Good grief! I am tickled pink and all but overcome by excitement! I just discovered that Dr. Michio Kaku will be giving the keynote presentation at the forthcoming Embedded Systems Conference (ESC 2010) in Silicon Valley (April 26-29, McEnery Convention Center, San Jose).

As you are doubtless aware, Dr. Kaku is an American theoretical physicist specializing in string field theory (this is like string theory but more complicated – string field theory really makes your eyes water). He is also a futurologist, an author, and a radio and TV personality who is incredibly good at explaining science to the masses in general and to me in particular. You have doubtless seen him on TV (on the History Channel or the Science Channel or the Discovery Channel or ... well, pretty much any and every channel, really) explaining all sorts of "stuff", from Time, to Gravity, to String Theory, to the way things will be in the not-so-distant-future, to the elusive Theory of Everything.

I love all of this type of stuff (see my book reviews on Reinventing Gravity, In Search of Time, and Universe on a T-Shirt, for example), and the fact that Dr. Kaku obviously has a passion for understanding things and also for explaining them has made him one of my personal heroes.

As fate would have it, I was chatting to Rich Nass (Editorial Director EE Times' Embedded and Events groups) a few minutes ago as I pen these words. You can only imagine my surprise when Rich informed me that he had met up with Dr. Kaku a few days ago, and that Dr. Kaku is going to give the keynote address at the forthcoming Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) that will be held in April in Silicon Valley.

EE Times' Rich Nass (right) with theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku

Dr. Kaku will be presenting his talk on Tuesday April 27 from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. (I'm planning on getting there around 5:00 a.m. to ensure a front row seat.) To be honest, generally speaking I rarely enjoy keynote speeches (unless I'm the guy who is giving them), but I am really, REALLY looking forward to this one!

As an aside, I recently read The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory by George Musser. This audacious little book provides an extremely good introduction to a very complicated subject, but it did leave me with a few questions (typically around 10-to-20 on each page [grin]). So... maybe I can persuade Rich to introduce me to Dr. Kaku, in which case I will almost certainly amaze him with the depths of my ignorance (grin).

And as one further aside, maybe there is an explanation for our portion of the multi-universe having eleven dimensions with all but four being scrunched up so small that no one can see them. Someone just pointed me to a rather interesting suggestion on AbstrouseGoose.com (see http://abstrusegoose.com/235).