Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku (/ˈmiːtʃioʊ ˈkɑːkuː/; Japanese: カク ミチオ, 加來 道雄; born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, science communicator, futurologist, and writer of popular science. He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film. He is also a regular contributor to his own blog, as well as other popular media outlets. For his efforts to bridge science and science fiction, he is a 2021 Sir Arthur Clarke Lifetime Achievement Awardee.

His books Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), The Future of the Mind (2014), and The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything (2021) became New York Times best sellers. Kaku has hosted several television specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.

Kaku was born in 1947 in San Jose, California. His parents were both second-generation Japanese-Americans. According to Kaku, his grandfather came to the United States to participate in the cleanup operation after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and his father and mother were both born in California. Both his parents were interned in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center during World War II, where they met and where his elder brother was born.

According to Kaku, he was inspired to pursue a career in physics after seeing a photograph of Albert Einstein's desk at the time of his death. Kaku was fascinated to learn that Einstein had been unable to complete his unified field theory and resolved to dedicate his life to solving this theory. For a high school science fair, Kaku built a 2.3 MeV "atom smasher" in his parents' garage. Using scrap metal and 22 miles (35 km) of wire, the device was powerful enough to produce antimatter. It was at this National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship.

Kaku attended Harvard College, where he was a resident of Leverett House, and graduated summa cum laude in 1968 as the first in his physics class. He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a PhD and holding a lectureship at Princeton University in 1972.

In 1968, during the Vietnam War, Kaku, who was about to be drafted, joined the United States Army, remaining until 1970. He completed his basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, he was never deployed to Vietnam.

As part of the research program in 1975 and 1977 at the department of physics at the City College of the City University of New York, Kaku worked on research on quantum mechanics. He was a Visitor and Member (1973 and 1990) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and New York University. As of 2024, he holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York.

Between 1970 and 2000, Kaku had papers published in physics journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. In 1974, Kaku and Prof. Keiji Kikkawa of Osaka University co-authored the first papers describing string theory in a field form.