Michio Kaku's journey to finishing Albert Einstein's final manuscript started in his parents' garage.
When he was in high school, Kaku built an atom collider that generated a magnetic field 20,000 times that of the earth, which is "enough to pull the fillings out of your teeth if you got too close to the machine."
"My poor mom thought I was crazy building all these gigantic machines in the garage," Kaku said. "But it got me a scholarship to Harvard and that set me off on this great journey to find out what was in that book."
On Wednesday night, Kaku, a world-renowned physicist, futurist and popular science advocate, addressed a packed Alumni Arena as the inaugural speaker of the 27th annual Distinguished Speakers Series. He sat down with The Spectrum for an interview beforehand.
Kaku believes science is not a luxury but "an engine to all the wealth you see around you," and he has taken on a role in popular science to push this point.
After graduating from Harvard in 1968 and receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley in 1972, Kaku has dedicated his career to popularizing science. He appeared in his first documentary, We Are the Guinea Pigs, in 1980 and has since appeared in many movies and TV shows.
He has discussed topics ranging from parallel universes to time travel to UFO sightings. He has also published seven books, including two New York Times Best Sellers, "Physics of the Impossible" and "Physics of the Future." His next book, "The Future of the Mind," is scheduled for publication in 2014.
Kaku is currently a physics professor at CUNY City College.
Kaku discussed physicists' influence on the past through inventions like the laser and the transistor but brought comedy to his talk as well, quoting Yogi Berra and Woody Allen, often evoking waves of laughter from the audience.
Kaku also discussed his educational journey and what he thinks is wrong with the way physics is taught today.
Kaku's journey was inspired by his two childhood heroes: Albert Einstein and Flash Gordon.
He admired Einstein for his life's work but enjoyed Flash Gordon's portrayal of the future.
It was Einstein's unfinished manuscript that motivated Kaku to become a physicist. He wanted to learn not just how to read Einstein's book, but also how to finish it. At the same time, he was in awe of the ray guns, starships, aliens and the technology of the future portrayed in the television show "Flash Gordon."
"But then I began to realize that the two things are really the same - physics and the future," Kaku said. "If you want to really understand the future - to get a time frame of what's possible, what's impossible, when might certain technologies come to fruition -you really have to have a grounding in physics."
In his lecture, he attributed the economic booms and busts of the early 19th, 20th and 21st centuries to physicists' inventions of the steam engine and internal combustion engine and their contributions to computer technology. He discussed how each stimulated the economy but also contributed to the economic collapses of their times.
His biggest point of emphasis was on the medical field, calling the 20th century "the century of physics" and saying the 21st century has the potential to be "the century of biology."
Through research, Kaku expects scientists to unlock what he believes to be the most mysterious object in our galaxy: the human brain. The Human Brain Project, an exhaustive research initiative to discover exactly how the brain works, is being funded by the United States and the European Union similarly to the way the Human Genome Project was.
Kaku predicts the future will include organs that can be printed on demand with 3D printers using tissue samples from the patient who will receive the artificial organ. He said scientists have already been able to grow bladders that have been successfully transplanted.
To illustrate this point, Kaku showed a short video outlining the possibilities of future technology, not just in the medical field, but in other fields.
Kaku also discussed the plummeting cost of computer chips. The cost of computer chips will be a penny, he said, which will lead computers of the future to become disposable, just like paper.
He sees a world where everything is computerized, but the computer as we know it today will cease to exist. Instead, he predicts a world where people will interact with computers with their minds and all files will be stored on the cloud server.
He spends much of his time at CUNY impressing his passion for science upon college students.
Kaku believes physics is taught "upside down and backward" to undergraduates. He rattled off a list of inventions that physicists have at least had a hand in creating, including the laser, transistor, television, microwaves, computers and the World Wide Web.
But undergraduates sometimes take only one course in physics and never know about these inventions, he said.
"Most of the world's economy is structured around lasers and computers, but we never teach it that way," Kaku said. "So I think no wonder kids are bored stiff. No wonder they drop out like flies. No wonder they think that physics is totally irrelevant in their life, when actually we live in a physics-dominated world."
He also addressed how times have changed.
"We graduate kids into the world of 1950," he said. "We don't live in 1950. Science has moved on, but we don't prepare kids to live in the world of today, and that's the fundamental problem."
He said the students of India and China are "lean and hungry" and they realize science is their "meal ticket." Kaku said American kids don't realize this.
He advised every student to understand "they are sitting on a gold mine." Jobs of the future will be more technical, and having a technical degree will be a crucial step in the direction of success, according to Kaku.
Kaku closed his speech with a story about Einstein - one modern world-changer reminiscing on his role model.
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