This was pretty lame. Kaku dumbed down and misrepresented a lot of the science, particularly in the second episode about "parallel universes," and it was a pretty obnoxious fiction for him to pretend he was "designing" stuff when he was really just describing the work of other theoretical physicists. The "ship design" in those photos is completely arbitrary, aside from the ring feature; it's pure showmanship (and was no doubt largely the work of the show's art department). The real information is in the discussion of the field around the ship. For instance, it's useful to know that the negative energy would be needed on the sides of the bubble with positive energy in front and back (which is no doubt the basis of the ring design that's been proposed before and that this piece of artwork copies).
He's also blurring the line between fact and fiction a bit too much, downplaying the difficulty of making any of this real. The goal should be just to use these "inventions" as a conceptual framework for talking about real scientific ideas, but he's oversimplifying the ideas to support the fantasy and perpetuating the popular misconception of science as being about inventing rather than observing and theorizing.
Not to mention that none of the three types of "parallel universe" he talked about in episode 2 are what SF fans normally mean when they use the term "parallel universe," i.e. alternate timelines as predicted by the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. And it was very misleading to talk about universes with different physical laws being just like ours with a few differences. Change the laws of physics even slightly and you couldn't have stars or planets at all, let alone humans. So he skipped over or distorted more science than he actually presented.
But in that first episode, when they were interviewing SF fans at a convention, I could swear I recognized a couple of them.
