Michio Kaku!

Call this Erin McKean deja vu.

I left work promptly today and zipped over to my wife's workplace so I could surprise her by joining her for the commute home. Fate rewarded my hopeless romanticism by having me bump right into Michio Kaku!

Who is Michio Kaku, you might ask? Well, he's only one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists. I am proud to be nerd enough to recognize him on sight, as The Discovery Channel is one of my Turbo buttons on my DirecTV remote control.

Upon spotting him, I manged to voice the first consonant of his name, and couldn't finish the rest because - as if sitcom or movie scripted - a phalanx of humans (fine, I'll dumb it down to "like a whole bunch of people") suddenly passed between me and Mr. Kaku and I simply couldn't red rover through the crowd to go over and say hello to him. By the time the marching column passed, he was long gone, apparently in a hurry to get somewhere.

It immediately hit me where he might be going. It so happens that this week the World Science Festival is conducting many events in New York. He *had* to be heading to one of their functions and he was probably a speaker.

I was right. Once home, I Googled to see if he's speaking anywhere and voila:

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2008-festival/events/all-events/parallel-lives

Cool stuff. I'm thrilled to have said "M" to him.