Science and the search beneath the surface

I am a scientist-entrepreneur, inventor, and principal and founding member of The Quantum Bicycle Society — Quicycle — an international physics think tank devoted to foundational science.

​

Quicycle carries forward a line of investigation begun by physicists John G. Williamson and Martin van der Mark, whose work explored the possibility that elementary particles may possess intelligible internal electromagnetic structures. Our collaborative research examines some of the deepest questions in physics: the nature of charge, mass, spin, matter, and the foundations of quantum mechanics.

​

My own research interests center on electromagnetic field theory, toroidal field configurations, and models in which familiar particle properties emerge from organized structures of energy and momentum. I am particularly interested in the Williamson–van der Mark confined-photon model of the electron and in the larger possibility that quantum phenomena may arise from physical structures we have not yet fully understood.

​

Alongside this theoretical work, I help lead deep-technology research and intellectual-property programs involving photonic integrated circuits and high-temperature superconductivity, with additional work exploring a moderate-energy approach to nuclear fusion.

​

This scientific work has influenced everything else I write. It has taught me to look beneath appearances, to question explanations that have become familiar merely through repetition, and to search for a coherent mechanism beneath every observed effect.

​

The animal within the human

That same impulse — to look beneath the visible surface — led me toward the subject of human behavior.

​

My nonfiction book, The Animal In The Mirror, examines the hidden influence of human survival instinct on emotion, thought, relationships, belief, group behavior, politics, religion, scientific integrity, and the societies we create.

​

We tend to experience our feelings and opinions as direct expressions of a rational, conscious self. Yet much of what we think and do begins in an older biological system concerned with danger, security, belonging, status, reward, attachment, and control. The survival instinct does not merely help us escape physical threats. It shapes whom we trust, what we fear, how we respond to disagreement, and how readily we mistake an emotional reaction for an objective truth.

​

Understanding this does not require us to reject our animal nature. It allows us to see it more clearly and compassionately.

The Animal in the Mirror explores a progression from Emotional Intelligence, through Emotional Wisdom, toward Conscious Evolution: first recognizing what we feel, then understanding why the reaction arose, and finally creating enough awareness between impulse and action to make a genuine choice.

​

The book received the International Firebird Book Award, the Maincrest Media Award, and a FAPA President’s Book Award. More important to me, readers have described it as a framework that helped them understand themselves and their relationships in a fundamentally new way.

​

Imagining humanity’s future

My hard science fiction novel, The Intrepid: Dawn Of The Interstellar Age, approaches many of the same foundational questions from another direction.

​

The novel imagines humanity’s first steps into interstellar space and the scientific, political, and human consequences of discoveries that overturn our understanding of the universe. I wanted to write a story that offered the momentum, mystery, and scale of a space adventure while taking its scientific foundations seriously.

​

The science in The Intrepid is not decorative scenery. It is part of the story’s architecture. The novel draws upon real questions in physics, propulsion, cosmology, consciousness, and humanity’s long-term future. It asks not only whether we can reach the stars, but whether our emotional and social development will keep pace with our technological power.

​

The Intrepid received the Gold Medal in the FAPA President’s Book Awards, the Maincrest Media Award, and the Literary Titan Book Award.

​

One inquiry, expressed in different forms

At first glance, a book about survival instinct and a novel about the dawn of interstellar civilization may seem unrelated. To me, they belong to the same inquiry.

• Science investigates the hidden structures within matter.

• Psychology investigates the hidden structures within behavior.

• Fiction allows us to explore what those structures may mean for the future.

​

Across all three, I am interested in the distance between what humanity can become and what our present habits, assumptions, and instincts still allow us to be.

​

My professional life has included work in technology, internet entrepreneurship, entertainment, online branding, film and television production, political consulting, and science and mathematics education. I also compose music and continue to regard the piano as both an instrument and a laboratory for creating ordered pressure waves in the air.

​

These experiences have reinforced my belief that knowledge becomes most valuable when we connect ideas that are usually kept apart.

​

An Earthling first

Beneath all the professional descriptions, I still think of myself most simply as an Earthling.

​

I hope for meaning, health, security, love, and the opportunity to make a worthwhile contribution with the life energy available to me. In those essentials, I am no different from anyone else.

 

Seen from space, the Earth has no political borders. Every human argument, identity, triumph, tragedy, and aspiration unfolds on the surface of the same small world. Yet our survival biology continually encourages us to divide that world into competing groups of “us” and “them.”

​

I aspire toward a consciousness and identity that connect people rather than separate them. I do not always succeed. None of us does. Consciousness is not a status we achieve once and permanently possess. It is a discipline of noticing when fear, pride, loyalty, resentment, or the need to be right has taken control—and then trying again to see more clearly.

​

That aspiration is at the heart of both my scientific and literary work.

​

We possess remarkable intelligence, creativity, and technological power. Whether those gifts ultimately serve us will depend on whether we develop the emotional wisdom to use them well.

​

We can be better. But first, we must understand what keeps getting in our way.

​

Thank you for joining me on part of that journey.