My Father the Physicist
Michio Kaku
Michio Kaku, born in San Jose, California, in 1947, is a theoretical physicist and professor at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. He is the father of the string field theory, a quantum leap toward a grand unified theory of everything. As a bestselling author, on-air personality, and regular guest on talk shows and science programs, Kaku has also become one of the country’s most well-known disseminators of scientific information to a general audience. He and his wife, Shizue, have two daughters, Alyson and Michelle.
Michio helping Michelle (eleven years old) prepare to perform at her uncle’s wedding, 1995
whenever i think of my father, the first image that comes to my mind is him twirling a lock of his long, wavy hair with his left hand and drawing equations in the air with his right, all the while looking off into space. “I get paid to think,” he used to tell me. “It’s the best job in the world.” He was constantly ruminating. When I was in high school, my father would look over my shoulder while I studied at our dining room table for the New York State Regents Exams, the mandatory statewide standardized tests, and become visibly frustrated. “Why are you memorizing these lists of rocks?” he’d ask, gesturing to my study guide for the Earth Sciences section of the test. “When are you going to use this information? No wonder our youth are not going into the sciences!”
To him, the fact that children weren’t being inspired by their school curriculum to pursue careers in the sciences was a grievous mistake. This is why he took it upon himself to show my sister, Alyson, and me just how exciting and practical these fields could be. He used to leave out big, evocative science books, like Isaac Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, filled with pictures and ideas far more fantastic than the sort of stuff we learned in school. And he’d bring home DIY science kits—I was in awe when we managed to illuminate a lightbulb with little more than some copper wire and a magnet.
As my sister and I got older, he never stopped opening our eyes to the wonders of science. The experiments simply grew more complex. In high school, my father helped me build a Wilson cloud chamber, a particle detector that tracks the path of ionized radiation. We trekked all over New York City, heading to the Lower East Side for dry ice and to Chinatown to find craftsmen willing to make us a specialized plastic cylinder we could use for our cloud chamber. Once we’d obtained radioactive isotope samples through the mail, we put it all together and watched as the ionized particles left tiny curving trails in the piece of velvet cloth we’d placed inside the chamber, capturing their movements with a fancy new digital camera we’d purchased for the experiment.
Looking back, I think explaining the complicated ideas behind these projects to us kids helped him figure out how to communicate about science to the masses. The way he describes scientific topics on television and radio programs now is the same way he used to explain them to us in private.
Dad also encouraged us to be creative. He fostered my sister’s love of painting and making pottery. He sat with me for hours while I practiced the violin, listening to me play the same passages over and over again without ever seeming to mind. And he took us ice-skating every week, eventually becoming an avid skater himself. He and our mom urged us to follow our dreams, whatever they might be, just as long as we pursued them to the best of our ability. He’d say to us, “If you find that your passion is garbage collecting, that’s fine, but then you better be the best garbage collector ever.”
When my sister fell in love with cooking and baking, my parents purchased new cooking utensils for the kitchen, helped her organize special cooking nights at the apartment, and encouraged her to seek out internships at prestigious restaurants. Now Alyson is a successful pastry chef.
For a while, I thought I wanted to go into theoretical physics like my father. But in college, I realized that I enjoyed interacting with and helping people, which didn’t really fit with the frequently sequestered lifestyle of a physicist. So I chose a different path in the sciences and went to medical school, where I studied neurology. Today, it’s my job to motivate and educate the next generation. Thankfully, years of sitting with my father has given me a lifetime of practice in watching inspiration catch fire.