Teen Michio Kaku Built an Antimatter Machine in His Garage

Most teenagers tinker with cars in their garage. Michio Kaku decided to build a machine capable of creating antimatter.

In 1963, the 17-year-old high school student constructed a fully functional particle accelerator—an atom smasher—using 400 pounds of transformer steel he got from Westinghouse and 22 miles of copper wire. He wound the massive coils on his high school football field with help from his parents.

The device wasn't some science fair prop. It generated 2.3 million volts and produced a magnetic field of 10,000 gauss—20,000 times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. The machine consumed 6 kilowatts of power, so much that turning it on would blow every fuse in his parents' house and plunge the neighborhood into momentary darkness.

What Was He Trying to Do?

Kaku's goal was to accelerate particles to velocities high enough to produce gamma ray collisions capable of creating antimatter. Yes, the same exotic stuff that powers the starship Enterprise. When particles collide at extreme energies, they can create particle-antiparticle pairs—matter and antimatter springing into existence from pure energy.

While accounts differ on whether the garage accelerator successfully produced antimatter during its brief operational life before destroying his house's electrical system, the physics were sound. The device was theoretically capable of the feat.

Not Bad for a Science Fair Project

Kaku entered his homemade particle accelerator in the National Science Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There, it caught the attention of legendary physicist Edward Teller—the "father of the hydrogen bomb"—who took Kaku under his wing as a protégé.

Teller helped arrange the Hertz Engineering Scholarship, which gave Kaku a full ride to Harvard University. Not a bad return on investment for some scrap metal and copper wire.

The garage project launched Kaku into a career as one of the world's most prominent theoretical physicists. He went on to become a leading expert in string theory and a popularizer of science through books like Physics of the Impossible and countless television appearances.

But it all started in a garage in California, with a teenager who looked at particle physics and thought, "I can build that."