Michael Berkeley’s guest is the theoretical physicist Dr Michio Kaku - without doubt the only guest ever to have built a particle accelerator in their garage while still in high school. After that auspicious start Michio went onto become the co-founder of string theory in the 1970s; a professor at The City University of New York; and one of the world’s most prominent scientists.

He is also a great science communicator, so alongside his hundreds of scientific papers, he has written bestselling science books and appears regularly on television and radio all over the world. His latest book, The God Equation, describes his quest to continue Einstein’s search for a ‘theory of everything’.

Michio tells Michael how that particle accelerator drove his mother to distraction by blowing every fuse in the house and how his parents survived internment as Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. And he shares his passion for ice dancing to opera arias and his life-long love of the trumpet.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3