Michio Kaku (Japanese: カク ミチオ, 加來 道雄, /ˈmiːtʃioʊ ˈkɑːkuː/; born January 24, 1947) is an American physicist, science communicator, futurologist, and writer of popular-science.

Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film.

[5] 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.

[8] 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.

[17] 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 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.

Each 30-minute episode discusses the scientific basis behind imaginative schemes, such as time travel, parallel universes, warp drive, and similar.

Kaku is generally a vigorous supporter of the exploration of space, believing that the ultimate destiny of the human race may lie in extrasolar planets, but he is critical of some of the cost-ineffective missions and methods of NASA.

[citation needed] Kaku credits his anti-nuclear war position to information he learned via programs he heard on the Pacifica Radio network during his student years in California.

It was during this period that he made the decision to turn away from a career developing the next generation of nuclear weapons in association with his mentor, Edward Teller, and instead focused on research, teaching, writing, and accepting media opportunities to educate.

[citation needed] His remark from an interview in support of SETI, "We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation... and we wouldn't even know", is used in the third Symphony of Science installment "Our Place in the Cosmos".