Like the New Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos? Check out Page 7

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is getting good reviews for his new Cosmos TV science series, which premieres tonight (March 9) on National Geographic Channel and Fox.

You can get some good background on this show, who's putting it together, what happened three decades ago, and why it all matters — on page 7 of my latest issue of Galaxis: The Worlds of Science and Science Fiction. It's a free digital magazine, and if you like Cosmos, you might well like Galaxis.

Podcast of Michio Kaku's Commonwealth Club Program

Michio Kaku at The Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley on March 28, 2011. Photo by Ed Ritger.

As readers of this blog know, I had the honor of moderating the March 28, 2011, question-and-answer session with famed physicist Dr. Michio Kaku at The Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto. The podcast of that program is now available. You can listen to the free podcast of this program on the Club's web site, or you can download it from iTunes (click that link or just search iTunes for "commonwealth club").

Kaku was in town to discuss his new book, Physics of the Future, which had just been released a couple weeks earlier and was already on The New York Times best-seller list. He also made some comments about the nuclear crisis in Japan.

This program will air on KQED Radio in the Bay Area on Friday, April 29, at 8:00 p.m. The following couple weeks will see the program airing over The Commonwealth Club's nationwide radio network of about 230 stations. So check your local radio station.

It's a great program. Kaku's not only a very smart man, but he is an excellent and entertaining speaker who can make important and complex scientific concepts and explanations understandable to those of us who are not world-famous physicists.

Enjoy.

On Stage with Michio Kaku

Above, courtesy of The Commonwealth Club's great photographer, Ed Ritger, is famed physicist and co-founder of string field theory Dr. Michio Kaku (right). I'm the other gentleman in the photo, which shows us on stage at the Cubberley Theatre in Palo Alto, California, where the Club event took place before a sold-out audience of about 300 people.

I'd love to tell you that we were on stage together so that Kaku could ask my advice about various perplexing scientific problems, but in truth we were there fielding audience questions about his new book, Physics of the Future.

More on this as I write it up. But, to put it briefly, if you ever have the chance to talk with a genius physicist, do so. And if that genius is Dr. Kaku, you'll enjoy every minute of it.

Backstage with Michio Kaku

The photos here show famed physicist Dr. Michio Kaku on-stage (despite this blog post's headline), signing books following his Monday, March 28, 2011, speech and audience Q&A at The Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley.

But there was a backstage, too. Before his speech, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Kaku in the green room, where we discussed some of the ideas he explores in his great new bestseller, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100. I had known that he was born in San Jose, but I hadn't known that he had grown up in the South Bay, leaving only upon graduation from high school in 1964. He had some nice remarks about growing up here, back when Silicon Valley looked so different than it does today. He expanded upon some of his remarks during his speech to the sold-out audience at Palo Alto's Cubberley Theatre, as well as in the Q&A session, which I moderated.

I will write up a portion of the interview for my next column in Northside San Francisco. After they publish it, they also post it online, at which point I'll post an only slightly edited transcript of the interview on this blog, as I did with my Premal Shah and P.J. O'Rourke interviews. In the meantime, I will be working on the next issue of The Commonwealth magazine, which is slated to feature Dr. Kaku on the cover.

So it's all-Kaku, all the time around here. And that's not bad.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on How it'll All End

The great astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke at The Commonwealth Club of California in early 2007, and in part of his talk, he describes the destruction that could be wrought by earth's collision with a comet.