Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science (science communicator). He is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and 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 San Jose, California, to second-generation Japanese-American parents. Reflecting on his childhood, he said that his grandfather had come to the United States to do the cleanup operation after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and his father and mother were both born in California; his father in Palo Alto and his mother in Marysville. 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.

Kaku 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. By the time Kaku was in high school, he had developed a strong passion for physics. For a science fair, Michio built a 2.3 MeV “atom smasher” in his parent's garage. 

Using scrap metal and 22 miles of wire, he created a magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s, as well as collisions 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 graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1968 and was first in his physics class. 

He attended the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a Ph.D. 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.