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GREAT MAMBO CHICKEN AND HE TRANSHUMAN CONDITION Science Slightly Over the Edge. By Ed Regis. 308 pp. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. $18.95.

CAN a vertebrate's brain that's been thrown into the deep freeze retain its unique electrical activity? Can two-legged animals live and procreate in a place with a gravitational field much stronger than the earth's? Can a person hitchhike on a comet to get out of this solar system? Can one build a computer that would faithfully represent the human brain? These and many more difficult questions are extensively dealt with by Ed Regis in "Great Mambo Chicken and the Trans human Condition." (By the way, a great mambo chicken -- a fowl with "brute strength and endurance" -- is what you get when you raise a normal chicken in a hypergravity chamber.)

There is no single hero in the book. The various heroes are a group of unaffiliated scientists, thinkers and visionaries who, in their separate domains, have laid the foundation for the communal thinking of a group called the L5 Society and who are now its scientific and technological scouts. ("L5" is short for the fifth Lagrangian region, a place between the moon and the earth where a third body will stay at rest.) They all started in more traditional experimental and theoretical fields and then took the logical steps that led them to imaginary and previously un imagined worlds and conditions.

In the history of science there are many examples of eminent scientists who proclaimed that something was impossible just before it became a reality. In 1880, John Trowbridge, the head of the physics department at Harvard University, said that every important discovery in physics had already been made. In 1933, about a decade before the creation of the atomic bomb, Lord Rutherford, who discovered the structure of the atom, said: "The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine." Mr. Regis informs us that in 1926, a British professor, A. W. Bickerton, said: "This foolish idea of shooting [ a rocket ] at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialization will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments."

SOME naysayers don't even limit themselves to future events. We learn that in 1906, three years after the Wright brothers flew their plane, Simon Newcomb, a mathematician and astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, said that "a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air" was impossible.

Perhaps, then, we should attend to Clarke's law, formulated by the ingenious science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

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Mixing fact and fiction, Mr. Regis, the author of "Who Got Einstein's Office?," a book about the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., writes of what he calls a transhuman future -- a future, in other words, that transcends normal human limits. He describes fantastical ideas as if they were coming true: we read of Gerard O'Neill and Keith and Carolyn Henson planning space colonies in the fifth Lagrangian region; Eric Jones and Ben Finney showing us how to travel to the stars; Eric Drexler giving us "complete control over the structure of matter" with his nanotechnology (that is, moving matter "atom by atom"); and Hans Moravec making people over into bush robots -- so named for their many branching arms -- and then reducing them to patterns of information that can be broadcast in outer space.

It is as if we were on the verge of reaching the state that John Barrow and Frank Tipler wrote of in their book "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle" -- Omega Point, when "life will have gained control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible."

As fiction, "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" is not so fascinating as Michael Crichton's novel "The Terminal Man," but as nonfiction it is a very well-written compendium of some bizarre thoughts and the mathematical, physical, biological and technological developments that led to them. And, for all we know, it may well point to the future of humanity and the universe.

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