Industry Spotlight Week 1: Physicist Michio Kaku
This, the first in a weekly series of Industry notables, theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku is a best-selling author, T.V. personality, professor and co-founder of the String Field Theory (a branch of String Theory) and is dedicated in his effort to carry on Einstein’s goal of uniting the universe under one equation. One formula to rule them all, and one theory to bind them.
Michio Kaku was born in California on January 24th, 1947 the son of Japanese immigrants. Kaku spent his early years playing chess eventually making it to first board of his high school’s chess team. His 60’s Palo Alto, CA high school years were spent listening to radio shows by scientists on Nuclear Power and the fear of this he attributes to his later successes in research science which would have not happened had he decided to specialize in nuclear armament. Kaku graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. from Harvard in the late 60’s where he sat top of his physics class. In 1972 he graduated University of California Berkley with a Ph. D; soon after though, Kaku found himself training as a military soldier to fight in the Vietnam War which luckily ended soon before he was to be deployed.
For the past 25 years Dr. Kaku has taught at CUNY, the City University of New York, yet makes appearances as a guest lecturer at universities like that of: Princeton, and NYU. Academically speaking, Dr. Kaku became the revered scientist he is today through extensive publishing in the field of String Theory or that is on how one simple equation can unite the 5 elements of String Theory under one equation called String Field Theory. His suggestions have quickly become actively researched fields relating to String Theory. However as Dr. Kaku would quickly point out though at this point the theories aren’t polished enough to use to test research data against.
Beyond his work in M and String Field theories though, Dr. Kaku has also written many Ph. D-level textbooks for students in the field of physics and quantum mechanics and has over 70 articles published in varied scientific journals. His wide success as an academic over the past 40 years earned him a profile in the 1994 feature-length award winning, ‘Me and Isaac Newton’, TV appearances on an astonishing amount of programs and networks, and hosted personally a wide selection of scientific documentaries.
With this unprecedented media coverage Dr. Kaku educates the masses on the most complexly abstract sciences but also on socio-scientific issues like global warming, energy depletion, and the hazards of nuclear armament. In Kaku’s most recent book ‘Physics of of the Impossible’, which spent 5 weeks of the past year in the New York Times Best Sellers list. Dr. Kaku writes about invisibility, force fields, teleportation, deep space colonization, and time travel; which are all currently impossible but ranked in likelihood and when we might one day be able to perfect these technologies. Consistently however, the book highlights the move towards sustainability and longevity of a healthy planet earth as fundamental prerequisites for our species to survive long enough to make these currently impossible discoveries and to hopefully one day, through mathematics, properly understand the invisible governing forces present in our universe that hold the secrets to understanding existence.
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