Michio Kaku

Kaku was born in Palo Alto, California, and is of Japanese descent. He attended Cubberly High School (now closed) in Palo Alto where he was known as Mike Kaku and played first board on Cubberly's chess team around 1963. During this time, he had been experimenting heavily in his parents' garage. This attracted the attention of famous physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé. Kaku received a B.S. (summa cum laude) from Harvard University in 1968 where he came first in his physics class. He went on to the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. in 1972. In 1973, he held a lectureship at Princeton University. He was drafted and entered the US Army as an infantryman. He completed basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, but the Vietnam War ended before he was to be shipped out.

Currently he holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at City College of New York, where he has taught for more than 25 years. Presently, he is engaged in working on "Theory of Everything," seeking to unify the four fundamental forces of the universe: the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism. Additionally, he has been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, as well as at New York University.

Kaku is the author of several scholarly, Ph.D.-level textbooks and has had more than 70 articles published in physics journals covering topics such as superstring theory, supergravity, supersymmetry, and hadronic physics (although he has not published an original research article in seven years). Based on the number of citations his work has received in the academic literature, Kaku has an h-index of 22. He is also known as an author of popular science books, including the best-sellers Visions, Hyperspace, and Parallel Worlds. He co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson.

Kaku strongly protested the launch of the Cassini Space Probe, claiming if the amount of nuclear fuel use by its radioisotope thermoelectric generator "is somehow dispersed into a populated environment, there is no question that such an accident could cause significant health effects resulting in thousands of casualties." He also accused the NASA risk assessment study of "scientific dishonesty." In 2005 Kaku appeared in the short documentary Obsessed & Scientific. The film is about the possibility of time travel and the people who dream about it. It has appeared at the Montreal World Film Festival and is in developmental talks about becoming a feature. He also appeared in the ABC documentary "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing" where he suggested that while it is extremely unlikely that extraterrestrials have ever actually visited Earth, there is no telling what form such a visitation might take so all cases deserve investigation and, considering the importance of the matter, more study should be done.

In February 2006, he hosted a four-part, four hour science documentary for BBC-TV, about the mysterious nature of time. Called Time, it won critical acclaim in reviews in the London media. Part One of the series concerns personal time, how animals and humans perceive and measure the passing of time. Part Two concerns cheating time, i.e. whether it's possible to extend the life span of animals and humans. Part Three concerns geological time, the quest to determine the age of the earth and the sun. And Part Four concerns cosmological time, the question of understanding the beginning of time and what happened at the instant of the big bang. Eventually, the BBC-TV special will be seen around the world. On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series 2057. Kaku has become a popular figure in mainstream media, due to his knowledge, as well as his accessible approach to explaining complex physics (quantum mechanics and other topics) from a layperson's point of view. While Kaku's technical writings are confined to theoretical physics, his public speaking and media appearances take many areas of interest. At such events, he has discussed topics ranging from the Kardashev scale to more esoteric subjects such as wormholes and time travel.

In addition to his work in physics, Kaku's interests extend to a number of subjects. Dr. Kaku has been an outspoken critic of nuclear war and nuclear power. He has been concerned about global warming, nuclear energy and the general misuse of science.

In January 2007, Kaku visited the Middle Eastern country of Oman. While there, he talked at length to select members of that country's decision makers. In an interview with local media, Dr Kaku elaborated on his vision of mankind's future. Kaku considers terrorism as one of the main threats in man's evolution from a Type 0 civilization to Type 1.

You can visit Michio's website at http://www.mkaku.org 

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