Japanese physicist Michio Kaku, author of popular science books

Dr. Michio Kaku is a physicist at the City University of New York and is a bestselling author, a popular science popularizer. He is one of the creators of the theory of the string field and continues Entshtein's attempts to unite the fundamental forces of nature.

short biography

Michio Kaku was born on January 24, 47 in the North American city of San Jose, California. He has Japanese roots - his grandfather immigrated to the United States to participate in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in 1906 in San Francisco.

Science attracted Kak from an early age, and while studying at a secondary school in Palo Alto, he became famous for creating an accelerator of elementary particles in the garage of parents.

Michio ultimately entered Harvard University, which graduated in 1968, becoming the best student-physicist. From there he got to Berkeley, the University of California, where he worked in a radiation laboratory and in 1972 received a Ph.D.

The following year, Kaku lectured in Princeton, but soon he was drafted into the army. He was trained for service in the infantry, but the Vietnam War ended sooner than he completed the course of combat training.

Current work

Currently, Michio Kaku has the honorary title of Professor Henry Semat, is a professor of theoretical physics at the City College and postgraduate study at the City University of New York, which has been teaching for over 25 years.

Currently, he is engaged in the "theory of everything", seeking to unite all the fundamental forces: weak and strong interaction, gravity and electromagnetism. Michio worked as a visiting professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies and at the University of New York. Member of the American Physical Society.

Scientific activity

Since 1969, Michio Kaku is widely published on string theory. In 1974, together with prof. K. Kikkava he wrote the first work on the topic of string fields, which today is one of its important directions, able in one equation to combine all five existing string theories.

In addition, he wrote one of the first papers on multi-loop amplitudes and the first article on their discrepancies. He first described the supersymmetry breaking at high temperatures in the early Universe, superconformal gravity, and was one of the pioneers of research on the nonpolynomial theory of a closed string field. Many of the ideas he put forward have been developed in active areas of string research.

His current work is devoted to the complex problem of disclosing the nature of M-theory and string theory, which, he believes, has not yet been brought to their final form. Until the theory is completed, it is premature, he believes, to compare it with experimental data.

Popular works

Kaku is the author of a number of textbooks for graduate students in quantum field theory and string theory, more than 70 articles published in journals devoted to supergravity, superstrings, supersymmetry and hadron physics. He is the author of the popular scientific books "Hyperspace", "Visions" and "Parallel Worlds". In collaboration with Jennifer Thompson, he wrote "Beyond Einstein."

The book "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku became a bestseller. She was recognized as one of the best popular scientific works of the year by the newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post. The book narrates about the parallel Universes, the curvature of time and the tenth dimension.

The work "Parallel Worlds" was a finalist for the British Samuel Johnson Award in the category of popular science literature. In the kig, questions of the origin of the universe, higher dimensions and the future of the cosmos are touched upon.

Michio Kaku - visionary

In one of his last books ("Physics of the Impossible"), technologies of invisibility, teleportation, foresight, starships, engines working on antimatter, time travel and much more are considered, everything that is considered impossible today, but can become a reality in the future. In this work, the author ranks the technologies according to when, in his opinion, they can become a reality. In March 2008, "The Physics of the Impossible" was on the New York Times best-selling list and stayed there for five weeks.

The book "Physics of the Future" by Michio Kaku was published in 2011. In it, the scientist writes about the impact of science on the fate of mankind and our daily life by the year 2100.

Social politics

Michio Kaku publicly stated his concern about the problems caused by man-made global warming, nuclear weapons, nuclear energy and the general abuse of science. He criticized the creation of the Cassini-Huygens space probe for the content of 33 kg of plutonium used as a thermoelectric generator. Notified the society about the possible consequences of fuel dispersion in the environment in the event of a breakdown and an accident during maneuvering near the Earth. He criticized the NASA risk assessment methodology. Eventually the probe was launched and successfully completed its mission.

Kaku is an ardent supporter of space exploration, believing that the fate of mankind is connected with the stars, but criticizes some economically ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

Kaku Michio: The physics of the soul

Dr. Kaku explains his anti-nuclear stance by saying that during his student years in California he listened to the radio "Pacifica". It was then that he decided to abandon the career of a new generation of nuclear weapons developer in cooperation with Teller and focused on research, teaching, writing books and working in the media. Kaku joined forces with Helen Keldicott and Jonathan Schell to create the Peace Council - a global movement against nuclear weapons that emerged in the 1980s during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

Kaku was a member of the board of the Peace Council and WBAI-FM radio station in New York, where for a long time he conducted the "Studies" program devoted to the problems of science, war, peace and the environment.

Media personality

The American-Japanese physicist appeared in many media and on many programs and networks. In particular, he participated in the TV programs "Good Morning, America", "The Larry King Show", "60 Minutes", CNN, ABC News, Fox News, History, Science, Discovery and others.

In 1999, Kaku was one of the scientists about which the feature film "Me and Isaac Newton" directed by Michael Epted was created, which was funded by Paul Allen. The picture was rented throughout the country, broadcast on national television and won several cinematographic awards.

In 2005, Kaku starred in the short documentary Obsessed & Scientific about the possibility of time travel and about people who dream about it. The tape was shown at the Montreal World Film Festival. Kaku also participated in ABC's documentary "UFO: See is to Believe", in which he said that he considers it extremely unlikely that Earth was visited by aliens, but he urged to be ready to accept the possibility of the existence of civilizations that for millennia outstripped us in technologies based entirely on New physical phenomena. He also spoke about the future exploration of outer space and extraterrestrial life in the program of the Discovery Channel "Alien Planet" among many of the speakers who participated in the show.

In February 2006, Kaku starred in the role of presenter in the four-part documentary BBC, which explored the mysterious nature of time. The first series was devoted to personal time and our perception and measurement of its current. The second concerned "deception" of time, studying the possibilities of prolonging the life of organisms. The theme of geological time was devoted to the studies of the age of the Earth and the Sun. The last series dealt with cosmological time, its beginning and the events that occurred at the time of the Big Bang.

In 2007, Kaku led a three-hour program "2057", which discussed the topic of future medicine, urban planning and energy. In 2008, he starred in a documentary on the prospects of computers, medicine and quantum physics.

Kaku became a participant in such documentaries as "Vision of the Future" (2008), "Stephen Hawking: The Master of the Universe" (2008), "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole?" (2009-10), "The Physics of the Impossible" (2009-10) , "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2010), "The Science of Games" (2010), "How the Universe Works" (2010), "The Prophets of Science Fiction" (2011), "Through the Wormhole" (2011) Hu "(2012)," Hunting for Higgs "(2012)," Principle "(2014), etc.

Michio Kaku is popular in the media because of his knowledge and approach to presenting complex scientific issues. Although his work is limited to theoretical physics, speeches affect other areas. He spoke on such topics as Kardashev's scales, wormholes and time travel. According to Kaku, terrorism is one of the main threats to the evolution of mankind from type 0 civilization to type I.