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Michio Kaku

Theoretical Physicist and Futurist

The Distinguished Speaker Series of Southern California welcomes Michio Kaku
  • Beverly Hills: Sunday, March 13, 2016, 6:30 p.m.
  • Redondo Beach: Monday, March 14, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
  • Thousand Oaks: Tuesday, March 15, 2016, 8:00 p.m.
  • Pasadena: Wednesday, March 16, 2016, 8:00 p.m.

Dr. Michio Kaku is one of the most widely recognized figures in science in the world today. He is an internationally recognized authority in two areas. The first is Einstein’s unified field theory, which Dr. Kaku is attempting to complete. The other is to predict trends affecting business, commerce, and finance based on the latest research in science. He has written three NY Times Best Sellers. His latest, The Future of the Mind, hit #1 on the NY Times, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble Best Sellers List, making it the #1 hardcover, non-fiction book in the country. His Facebook page has 1.8 million fans, and over 240,000 people regularly receive his tweets.

Dr. Kaku was born in San Jose, California, to Japanese-American parents. Both his parents were interned in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center during World War II, where they met and where his brother was born. While attending Palo Alto Senior High School in California, Kaku assembled a particle accelerator in his parents’ garage for a science fair project. His admitted goal was to generate “a beam of gamma rays powerful enough to create antimatter.” At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 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, and received a Ph.D. in 1972, and that same year held a lectureship at Princeton University.

Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair in Theoretical Physics at the City Univ. of New York and been a professor at CUNY for almost 30 years. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton as well. His goal is the complete Einstein’s dream of a “theory of everything,” to derive an equation, perhaps no more than one inch long, which will summarize all the physical laws of the universe. He is the co-founder of superstring theory, a major branch of string theory, which is the leading candidate today for the theory of everything. His Ph.D. level textbooks are required reading at many of the world’s leading physics laboratories.

He is the author of several international best-sellers. He has two New York Times best-sellers, Physics of the Future, and Physics of the Impossible. Other books include Hyperspace and Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century. For Physics of the Future, he interviewed 300 of the world’s top scientists, many of them Nobel Laureates and directors of the largest scientific laboratories, about their vision for the next 20 to 100 years in computers, robotics, biotechnology, space travel, etc. The Physics of the Future gives the most authoritative and most authentic understanding of the world of the future. Physics of the Future was also chosen by Amazon as one of the Top 100 Books of 2011.

His other NY Times best seller, Physics of the Impossible, was the number 1 science book in the United States. His latest book is The Future of the Mind, which details the stunning breakthroughs being made in neuroscience, which are finally beginning to unravel the mysteries of the human brain. His book, Parallel Worlds, about the latest in cosmology, which was a finalist for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in the UK, and also a finalist for the Aventist science book award.

Dr. Kaku has appeared on almost every network TV news program as well as Nightline, 60 Minutes, CNN Fox News, BBC-TV, BBC-Radio, PBS’s Nova and Innovation, Tech-TV. He has also appeared on the David Letterman Show, the Colbert Report, the Conan O’Brian show, HBO’s Bill Maher Show, and has appeared on numerous science specials, including PBS’s Steven Hawking’s Universe, Science Odyssey, and Einstein Revealed, the BBC’s Future Fantastic, Parallel Universes, Copenhagen, Channel 4’s The Big G: the story of gravity, the Discovery Channel, the Learning Channel’s Exodus Earth, A&E, the History Channel’s Universe series and biography of Einstein, and many science documentaries.

He was featured in the full-length, 90 minute feature film, Me and Isaac Newton, which was nominated for an Emmy in 2001. He was profiled in Tech-TV’s Big Thinkers series and is a regular commentator on that cable network.

He has also appeared in a number of major science specials. In 2006, he hosted a four-part series for BBC-TV and BBC World on the nature of time, called Time. In winter of 2007, he hosted a three-part, three-hour Discovery TV series about the next 50 years, called 2057. He has also hosted a new three-part, three-hour documentary for BBC-TV about the future of science, called Visions of the Future. It received some of the highest ratings for BBC4. In Jan. 2009, he signed a contract with the Science Channel to host a 12-part science series based on his best-seller, Physics of the Impossible. The series aired in Dec. 1, 2009. His book, Physics of the Future, became the basis of a six-hour TV special on the Science Channel called Futurescape. Dr. Kaku is the public face of the Science Channel.
www.MKaku.org

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