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Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents, and attended and played first board on the chess team of Cubberly High School in Palo Alto in the early 1960s. At the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, N.M., he attracted the attention of physicist Edward Teller, who took Kaku as a protégé, awarding him the Hertz Engineering Scholarship.
Kaku received a B.S. degree summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1968 where he placed first in his physics class. He went on to attend the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and received a Ph.D. degree in 1972, and held a lectureship at Princeton University in 1973. During the Vietnam War, Kaku completed his US Army basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia and his advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis, Washington. However, the Vietnam War ended before he could be deployed as an infantryman.
Kaku currently holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics and holds a joint appointment at City College of New York, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has taught for more than 25 years.
Presently, he is engaged defining the "Theory of Everything", which seeks to unify the four fundamental forces of the universe: the strong force, the weak force, gravity and electromagnetism. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, and American Men and Women of Science.
He has published extensively in string theory since 1969. In 1974, along with Prof. K. Kikkawa, he wrote the first paper on string field theory, now a major branch of string theory, which can summarize each of the five string theories into a single equation.
In addition to his work on string field theory, he also wrote some of the first papers on multi-loop amplitudes in string theory, the first paper on the divergences of these multi-loop amplitudes, the first paper on supersymmetry breaking at high temperatures in the early universe, the first paper on super-conformal gravity, and also some of the first papers on the non-polynomial closed string field theory.
Many of the ideas he first explored have since blossomed into active areas of string research. His current research focuses on the difficult problem of revealing the underlying nature of M-theory and string theory, which he believes are not in their final form. Until the theory is completed, it is premature, he believes, to compare the theory too closely to experimental data.[citation needed]
Kaku is the author of several scholarly Ph.D. level textbooks on string theory and quantum field theory and has had more than 70 articles published in journals covering topics superstring theory, supergravity supersymmetry, and hadronic physics. He is also author of the popular science books, Visions, Hyperspace, and Parallel Worlds, and co-authored Beyond Einstein with Jennifer Thompson. Hyperspace was a best-seller and was voted one of the best science books of the year by both the New York Times[1] and the Washington Post. Parallel Worlds was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction in the UK.
His latest book, Physics of the Impossible, examines the technologies of invisibility, teleportation, precognition, star ships, antimatter engines, time travel and more—all regarded as things that are not possible today but that might be possible in the future. In this book, he ranks these subjects according to when, if ever, these technologies might become reality. In March 2008, Physics of the Impossible entered the New York Times Best-seller list, and stayed on for 5 weeks.
