Michio Kaku (; 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.
Kaku is the author of several textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory. An explicit description of the second-quantization of the light-cone string was given by Kaku and Keiji Kikkawa.
Kaku is most widely known as a popularizer of science and physics outreach specialist. He has written books and appeared on many television programs as well as film. He also hosts a weekly radio program.
Kaku is the host of the weekly one-hour radio program Exploration, produced by the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in New York. Exploration is syndicated to community and independent radio stations and makes previous broadcasts available on the program's website. Kaku defines the show as dealing with the general topics of science, war, peace, and the environment.
In April 2006, Kaku began broadcasting Science Fantastic on 90 commercial radio stations in the United States. It is syndicated by Talk Radio Network and now reaches 130 radio stations and America's Talk on XM and was the only nationally syndicated science radio program. When Kaku is busy filming for television, Science Fantastic goes on hiatus, sometimes for several months.
Kaku is also a frequent guest on many programs. As a guest on the program Coast to Coast AM on November 30, 2007, he reaffirmed his belief that the existence of extraterrestrial life is a certainty.
Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including Good Morning America, The Screen Savers, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, Imus In The Morning, Nightline, 20/20, Naked Science, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, Conan, The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Colbert Report, The Art Bell Show and its successor, Coast to Coast AM, BBC World News America, The Covino & Rich Show, Head Rush, Late Show with David Letterman, the Joe Rogan Experience, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
In February 2006, Kaku appeared as presenter in the BBC-TV four-part documentary Time which discussed the nature of time.
On January 28, 2007, Kaku hosted the Discovery Channel series 2057. This three-hour program discussed how medicine, cities, and energy could change over the next 50 years.
In 2008, Kaku hosted the three-hour BBC-TV documentary Visions of the Future, on the future of computers, medicine, and quantum physics, and he appeared in several episodes of the History Channel's Universe and Ancient Aliens series.
On December 1, 2009, he began hosting a 12-episode weekly television series for the Science Channel at 10 pm, called Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible, based on the book of the same name. Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, and similar. Each episode includes interviews with other scientists working on prototypes of these technologies, interviews with science fiction fans, and clips from relevant science fiction movies.