Bio

My name is Nathan O. Schmidt. I'm a software development engineer, scientist, and mathematician living in Boise, Idaho, USA. I'm also a dad, husband, martial artist, basketball coach, basketball player, and Alaska commercial fisherman—to name a few. I'm the founder of Cold Hammer R&D (it's basically my personal science website). In 2025 I started it because I value freedom and technical problem solving, straight up. Through discipline, perseverance, creativity, and collaboration, I firmly believe that the tools of science and mathematics can be used to build a successful future. If you've read my introduction on the home page, then you already know this. 😎

Here I give an autobiographical summary of aspects of my life that are relevant to facing challenges and my scientific ventures. The stage is set in Episodes I to III. The battles begin in Episode IV.

[Episode I] Early Days in Alaska

I was born and raised in Kenai, Alaska. I've always enjoyed doing activities with family and friends, such as fishing, hunting, biking, hiking, snowboarding, and competitive athletics. Mind. Body. Spirit. Family. Faith. Liberty through discipline. Individual responsibility. I learned to value these things as I grew up. And yes, the learning continues.

From my earliest years, during work or play or whatever we were doing in day-to-day life, I remember my dad explaining how things worked and concepts of physics to my brother and I. Starting in early elementary school, I spent a lot of time thinking about concepts like space, time, coordinates, gravitation, electro-magnetism, and the speed of light—to name a few. So while I've never had any formal physics training beyond what they would teach in high school, I've spent a lot of time and energy considering such concepts of the universe, even though I often understood little to none of the underlying mathematics. My dad also showed us the value of drawing diagrams, hard work, physical activity, and the great outdoors.

The first computer that I used was my family's Apple Macintosh 128K. Back in those days, one of my favorite things to do on the computer was to draw black-and-white pictures using MacDraw. When I was 10 years old, I started experimenting in HTML and created my first simple web page with a picture of a snow machine and a few paragraphs of text. But at age 13 is when my fascination with computers really exploded, and I started to teach myself the elementary basics of networking, websites, the internet, and cyber security on a Windows box. At age 15 my friend handed me the Red Hat 7 Linux install disk during Mrs. Burke's biology class and I've been hooked on Linux ever since—R.I.P. Gavin (a.k.a. "Cannibal"), I miss you bro. Linux is a great sandbox for learning, experimentation, and development. Of course I did (and still do) rock the dual partitions for both Linux and Windows. (Gavin and I needed Windows to take over Battle.net and build StarCraft websites on GeoCities... And of course we needed Windows to print out homework because in those days, Linux drivers were so user friendly and straightforward! 💀) When first learning to partition my hard drive to install the mighty Linux, do I dare mention how many times I screwed up my hard drive?! 🔥😂 Ahh yes, trial-and-error on a single box over a 56K modem with no YouTube and no StackExchange— the good ole days.

In these ventures, I discovered that computing technology served as a vehicle to practically limitless knowledge and accelerated learning, like visiting a library, but more like driving a starship (with blasters) through a galactic super library. I will never forget my excitement as I first learned about these innovations—feelings of both great empowerment and great humility. I saw great value in just diving in and going for it. The more I learned, the stupider I felt. But I discovered that in order to effectively learn new challenging things, I needed to: set aside my ego (at least temporarily), admit that I didn't know anything, and just go for it—then learn from any mistakes. Rinse and repeat.

As I trained my mind, I also trained my body. Hard. It's a spiritual thing. But it's also backed by science. The human brain is a powerhouse that consumes about 20% of the body's total energy, even though it only makes up roughly 2% of the body's total weight. This high energy demand supports critical functions like thinking, memory, and maintaining the body's physiological balance. Physical activity (especially intense) causes things like neurogenesis, improved blood circulation, the release of cognitive-enhancing neurotransmitters, enhanced neuroplasticity, reduced inflammation, and better sleep. In any case, I grew up doing a lot of physical activity like commercial fishing, hiking, hunting and working in the great outdoors, while playing sports like basketball, soccer, track and field, and football.

In 7th grade I played on my junior high school soccer team. The season was nearing the end and there were only a couple games left. I'd been practicing hard all season and had earned a starting position as a midfielder. One day we were playing our biggest rival team and I was all jacked up to win—I was too jacked up to win. I kept going back and forth with this big 8th grade defender on the other team. He kept running his mouth and talking trash as we repeatedly battled for the ball. I wasn't much of a big talker—all I cared about was getting in there and schooling him like a you-know-what. We were both playing overly aggressive and starting to lose control.

Not long before half-time my teammate passed me the ball not far in front of the goal. I pushed up hard, trapped it, and took a shot with my right foot. In the instant after the ball fired off my right foot and shot forward toward the goal—with my right foot still extended—that big 8th grade defender came down with an illegal slide tackle and snapped my leg in half.

It was a bad break. Both my tibia and fibula were broken all the way through, my fibula stuck out of my skin bleeding all over, and my ankle's growth plate was totally shattered. It was a mess. 💀

But I got lucky. Even though this was a small town in Alaska, there was an extremely talented surgeon available at the hospital who was able to fix it and prevent me from bleeding out. After the surgery, he said I would be able to walk again someday but there was a decent chance that I would never run again. For the next 3 months I was in a wheelchair with a cast that spanned from my toes to my hip. Not fun.

Finally, after a challenging and humbling 3 months, I got out of my wheelchair and started relearning to stand and walk in physical therapy and such. It was an unpleasant process but it felt great to be moving my leg again. I was concerned that I would never run again but I was determined to try like hell. 🔥😎

That spring I went out for my junior high school's track and field team as a "sprinter". I lost every single race by a long shot. My times were slower than every boy and every girl. My teammates mostly respected me because they knew what had happened but kids on the other teams were often running their mouths and laughing at me. Junior high kids can be relentless. 😂 It was an unpleasant process but I was starting to slowly run again, and those results greatly outweighed any meaningless words from a bunch of wannabe jokers. So I learned to simply ignore that garbage nonsense and I was so thankful and excited to be running again! Moreover, I decided to simply ignore all of the other competitors and only compete against myself for the remainder of the season. I remained focused and steadfast, and I continued making little improvements over time. Little did I know that this experience would be one of the most valuable lessons of my entire life. 💡

After the track and field season was over, summer started, and—while many of my childish competitors were playing video games, watching TV, eating junk food, and getting soft—I just kept training and competing against myself. Slowly but surely, I worked up to doing more and more sprint intervals, weights, plyometrics, and endurance running on a limited but steadily expanding capacity to consistently break my personal records. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Rest. Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Rest. etc. It was paying off big time.

I trained all summer and into the fall when soccer started again. This time I was a big 8th grader on the soccer team and, shockingly, I discovered that I was actually a little faster than I was in 7th grade just before the injury. I was so excited and motivated by the improvements that I just kept training after soccer season, through basketball season, and into the following track and field season, where I had become one of the fastest 8th graders on the team. As the track season further progressed, I started to crush many of my childish competitors on other teams who had harassed me the previous year—they weren't laughing at me anymore. 🤣 I felt like I had unlocked some secret "cheat code" of hard work by competing against myself year-round while these jokers were getting soft during the summer and vacations and such.

In any case, I kept my head down, stayed humble, and just kept training regularly and competing against myself year-round. I did the same thing with my studies. I repeated this training process year after year without losing fitness—just gaining. In 2004 I graduated high school after being recognized as Science Student of the Year, an All-State Football Player, and the new school-record holder in the 200-meter dash. This was the power of the "growth mindset". 🤘

Looking back, two great growth mindset things that I learned from my broken leg injury and competition were:

• How to lose. The injury and competition taught me how to lose with grace (under pressure). They taught me how to take shots and learn from misses/mistakes/mini-failures. Rinse and repeat. Get it dialed in. This is growing into the skill being practiced, and fundamental to important learning mechanisms such as neuroplasticity in the brain.
  
• How to compete effectively against myself. The injury and competition taught me that setting personal goals and competing against myself (year-round) was the most valuable tool for growth and breaking personal records. They taught me to focus on myself (as the competitor) and the variables that I could consistently control and measure (year-round), rather than trying to measure my progress against other competitors because depending on them can introduce inconsistencies and randomness (ex. they would have to be there training with me all the time).

I discovered these two things aren't just valuable for athletics, they're valuable for any personal or professional growth—which included growing into a skill that enabled me to partition a hard drive without blowing up the entire box. 🔥😂

These nostalgic childhood memories continue to fuel my starship today as I create software, grapple with the universe, and raise a family.

[Episode II] Working and Training in Oregon: Developing the Fundamentals

After graduating high school, I moved from Kenai, Alaska to La Grande, Oregon to pursue my undergraduate studies in computer science and mathematics at Eastern Oregon University (EOU). I was raised in a small town, so going to college in a small town in the mountains of eastern Oregon was a good fit for me. (I've never been much of a city guy, even though I currently live in Boise.) Though there were many similarities, I discovered that eastern Oregon and southcentral Alaska had some key differences: in Alaska we rode moose and dog sleds, meanwhile in eastern Oregon they rode these creatures called horses. Moreover, if you have ever lived in Oregon, then you know that eastern Oregon and western Oregon are quite different—I'll leave it at that. 😂

In any case, I got my money's worth at EOU. It wasn't some big fancy Ivy League school and the tuition was reasonable. It was a good deal. Not easy, but a good deal. The computer science program was very small and struggling to stay alive. The administration kept threatening to close the program because so many students avoided it—I suspect because the students feared the program's insane difficulty and/or they figured writing algorithms was immensely uncool. But good ole Dr. Croft battled to keep the EOU computer science program alive—and he succeeded. R.I.P. Dr. Croft—you are the man. When it came to course work, I followed a basic principle of hard work: you get out what you put in. About the last thing I needed was to accumulate a bunch of debt at some fancy, overpriced school. Year-round, I worked hard in various courses and jobs to learn what I could and save what I could.

I worked many 80-90 hour weeks at EOU. This was typical. Hard work was one of many great things that I was fortunate enough to learn from my dad and grandpa. As I worked my way up through the upper division computer science and mathematics courses, a new professor Dr. Suranga Hettiarachchi joined the Department of Computer Science at EOU. Suranga had profound knowledge and experience with swarm robotics and artificial intelligence. I was fortunate enough to earn a research position working under him to develop software for robots and machine learning—artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms—the good stuff! I also came up with an evidently new original idea called "A Hybrid Approach To Neural-Evolution" which mixed the two concepts together. I also tutored in computer programming, maintained the Linux lab, worked construction, and sprinted for the EOU track and field team. I was on the school-record breaking 4x100-meter dash relay team that provisionally qualified for the USA NAIA Championships and made the 100-Meter Dash Top 10 List at EOU. Then in 2008 I earned a B.S. in computer science and a minor in mathematics. There was some blood, sweat, and tears... but I made it: I learned the fundamentals and earned top marks. 😎

[Episode III] Working and Training in Idaho: To the Bleeding-Edge and Beyond

My hard work paid off. As a result, I earned a full ride graduate assistantship to pursue a M.S. in computer science at Boise State University (BSU) in Boise, Idaho to study bioinformatics and artificial intelligence. During my graduate studies, I worked as a research assistant and software developer on the United States Department of Defense's DNA Safeguard Project under my adviser Dr. Tim Andersen (an intelligent man with good character and intent) in an attempt to help cure cancer and other diseases by developing tools and prediction models with machine learning to analyze genome and proteome sequences with supercomputers to recommend possible solutions to immunologists to help guide their cancer research. In other words, if we could build software to do more of the heavy lifting and calculations, then there would be less heavy lifting and trial-and-error needed in the physical laboratory to therefore accelerate immunology work. Very cool stuff.

I worked on this stuff for a few years and became pretty familiar with the connected literature. Prior to that, I didn't have a traditional background in genetics or immunology—I had only a bit of random knowledge and one high school biology course (oh yeah, Mrs. Burke's class where Gavin gave me the Red Hat 7 disk). But my background in computer science and math helped me comprehend the relevant core technical concepts and results from a different point of view. It turned out that I was well prepared to help the team wrestle with problems in bioinformatics and immunology in the DNA Safeguard Project. I enjoyed working under Dr. Andersen and with the other folks at BSU; we had a good hard working team and I learned a lot from them.

In this effort, I was drawn to the hypothesis that cures for cancer and many other diseases may be possible and perhaps achievable in the near future. But I realized that first we MUST fully understand the underlying physical mechanisms to significantly reduce trial-and-error and accelerate immunology work—and that requires a complete unified field theory of physics that is experimentally-verifiable in the laboratory. Because if we don't hammer out this critical prerequisite, then such disease-fighting efforts may fail or remain significantly bottlenecked. (I mean 10-dimensional string theory is great, but if we can't experimentally verify it—or refute it—in a 3-dimensional laboratory, then it doesn't help us much in practice.)

As I was finalizing my thesis and contributions to the DNA Safeguard Project, numerous fundamental questions and ideas captivated my mind that were beyond the scope of my thesis work. I mean clearly, making fundamental contributions to a unified field theory was out of scope of the thesis and project. 🤣 But some things did seem to suggest an explanation of "the why" behind some of my results, and I figured that I could document some helpful hypotheses and suggestions in the future outlook chapter of my thesis. Let me clarify.

One main resulting observation was that some short length sequences were very common (i.e. had high frequencies) in organisms, while other sequences (of the same short length) were totally absent from all (sequenced-to-date) organisms; we observed this "nullomer" phenomena in genomes and proteomes. Long story short, one of my many hypotheses was that the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, and fractal geometry (the language of chaos theory), may be required to accurately encode the states and transitions of energy being stored and transferred in genomes and proteomes as "quasi-particle and collective excitation software" operating over "DNA and amino acid hardware", which may be expressed in terms of a computational language that we may develop from a mixture of concepts like interference phenomena and fractal geometry, which then may be used to develop mathematical models and software applications to explain nullomers and move towards more accurate understandings of the mechanisms and potential cures of monsters like cancer and disease. Furthermore, I hypothesized that fractals and "symmetry over magnification" may be required to efficiently and accurately decode the super-symmetry of the hierarchy problem in particle physics, which then would have direct application to decoding genomes and proteomes (with quasi-particles and collective excitations) to improve, for example, things like modern medicine or shockwave therapy or starship warp drives. Now again, I will emphasize that these were just hypotheses—nothing more.

[Episode IV] Battling the Dark Side: Round 1: Science Forum Cool Clubs and Scientific Elitism 101

Now as I mentioned, investigating these hypotheses was beyond the scope of my thesis and employment. So one weekend, as a half-serious little side project, I grabbed some of my chicken scratch notes on my hypotheses and threw them together in posts on some online physics forums. I figured it would spark some useful discussion with feedback, or perhaps even collaboration. Boy was I wrong.

What ensued was sheer hatred. Instead of attacking the ideas, they attacked me. (Well, if you consider words as "attacks". 😂) As we went back and forth over some points in the threads, I simply ignored their sequence of childish insults and, in between such fun, I attempted to parse out and extract some useful bits of info. I was irritated, but I wasn't too surprised.

Suddenly, a forum moderator named RPenner—who was leading attacks to begin with—started editing MY post records in the forum's database. RPenner was literally censoring and rewriting my words right in front of me, in my name, and there was nothing I could do about it because he had the admin-level access permissions to do so. This was infuriating, to put it mildly.

Now initially I figured that I could just step away from the situation and come back to it after I came to my senses and cooled off. After all, it's just some random science punks in an online forum, right? Wrong. So then RPenner and others somehow dug up a bunch of information on me and contacted my supervisor and others high up at BSU, where they attacked me by attempting to convince them that:

• my hypotheses were lies to be ignored, forbidden, and discredited,
• I was a dishonest person, and
• I should not be employed.

Now I felt that my supervisor and I had a pretty good working relationship; I mean I'd been working for him for a few years and he knew full well that I was an honest, competent guy who gets the job done. I mean sure, I had wild ideas and that is all part of brainstorming and innovation. But RPenner and his little fan club created a firestorm on me at BSU. Now of course I fought back, but I was way out numbered, and my words became meaningless. So although they failed to prevent me from working at BSU again, they succeeded in convincing BSU that my hypotheses were lies to be ignored, forbidden, and discredited—from the top down. (Meanwhile, my email inbox was getting spammed with hateful emails from strange addresses. Oh what joyful icing on the cake.) At this point, I stopped believing in a collaborative open-minded scientific community. Scientific elitism and censorship had taken hold and won this round. Indeed, these were acts of the Dark Side. 💀

From this round of conflicts with the Dark Side, I discovered that the Scientific Method is not being totally followed by "science experts", at least in contexts like this. More specifically, I learned that when an individual begins to apply the Scientific Method to a hypothesis in physics that involves certain topics or key words—like "Fibonacci sequence", "golden ratio", and "fractals"—it triggers coordinated personal attacks against the individual (who proposed the hypothesis), instead of applying the Scientific Method to support or refute the individual's hypothesis. It greatly concerned me that certain areas of science had become "forbidden", and that some random forum moderator dude and his little groupthink fanboy cool club from the internet science forums could single-handedly convince an entire "metropolitan research university of distinction" to come down on me like that. This kind of scientific elitism, censorship, and groupthink can:

• negatively impact real jobs and real lives, and
• greatly hinder and block scientific progress (ex. think quantum tech, medicine, and starship warp drives). 🚀

Not cool, bro.

But in any case, all this motivated me to keep learning and developing my hypotheses and theories via the Scientific Method as an independent research hobbyist because these things were important. Who cared what they thought. I was competing against myself and improving every day.

[Episode V] Decisions... Decisions...

As the DNA Safeguard Project came to closure and I tirelessly worked to finalize my thesis, I began interviewing and evaluating local job prospects in software development. I was excited to be moving onto the next chapter of my career. I was so ready to be done with BSU, especially now that I had been told not to talk or think about certain things and I was being shunned by folks there (though certainly not everyone, and I was grateful to my friends and colleagues Brad, Luke, Shane, and Casey—great guys, I missed working with them.) Software development was my career passion and 40-hour work weeks sounded like a cake walk. For years I'd worked so hard to get this far and some of these industry jobs were great opportunities that paid well. But a relentless force tore at my consciousness. I was divided.

Over the last few years, I'd become intrigued by not only software development, but bioinformatics and physics as well. In particular, I remained captivated by my two main hypotheses (from above) and the importance of investigating them via the Scientific Method to possibly contribute to a unified field theory that could be experimentally verified in the laboratory. (For the sake of conciseness, from this point forward, we'll refer to this as a "complete unified field theory".)

Moreover, over the last few years, I became highly confident that the energies and structures of biology, chemistry, and physics may be understood (at least to a large extent) as states and transitions somewhat like our classical binary computers, only way more advanced... Like quantum computers (which employ physical structures and energies to make computations, beyond just binary-based computations)... Like unbelievably amazing and sophisticated naturally occurring quantum computers that adapt and change and allow life to thrive with elegance and beauty beyond comprehension? Was this part of how God created us? Was this part of how God evolved us? Man oh man, what a trip. Quite a bit to process for my little monkey brain. 🙉 Very cool stuff if you ask me.

Man, if humanity could complete a unified field theory, the resulting future applications could help save millions or billions of lives. On the other hand, if used for evil, it could do exactly the opposite (ex. think real world Death Star, or worse). This wasn't just some pretend story or video game or something. This was the real world with real actions and real consequences. But I really believed that advancing science for the good of helping others was doing God's work. Scientists around the world had been fighting to complete a unified field theory for many years, and I knew this was the right thing to do. Did someone mention the growth mindset? 🤣

I didn't care what anyone thought on some internet science forums or at BSU or whatever. I knew that my work and hypotheses were important. Contributing to science to help others was certainly worthy of investing time and energy on... But time and cash money were limited. So if I was going to take a shot at this, then it needed to be planned out and time-boxed in a limited capacity. So I started considering some possibilities and had some discussions with family and friends. Decisions... Decisions...

[Episode VI] Battling the Dark Side: Round 2: The Quark Confinement Beast, Star Destroyers, and the Fall of Andrej Inopin

After considering the situation with my beloved (future wife) Marissa, we decided that for one year I would attack my hypotheses while attempting to secure job funding for it and do commercial fishing and some various temp part-time work as needed. Then evaluate my situation after one year of maximum effort. And I do mean maximum effort. I was not a man to hold back. Marissa was so supportive of my efforts and I'm forever thankful to her. She stood by my side—come hell or high water—when most others would probably have figured that I'd gone mad in a wild quest of science with delusions of grandeur. 🤣

My computer science and software development skills were strong, and my math skills were pretty strong, but my mathematical physics was weak sauce—I needed to up my game in mathematical physics. My hope was to find someone with a strong background in the latest cutting-edge mathematical physics who had similar research interests and initiate a collaborative effort. After searching and posting online for some time, I eventually began talking with Dr. Andrej "Andy" Inopin of the Department of Experimental Nuclear Physics at Karazin National University in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Andy was actively working on a solution to the Millennium Prize Problem of "quark confinement" (also known as the "Yang-Mills existence and mass gap" problem). In order to solve the problem, one needs to give a rigorous mathematical proof that quarks (the fundamental particles that make up protons and neutrons) cannot be isolated or observed individually, where instead they are always confined within larger particles called hadrons (ex. protons and neutrons). I was excited to discover that one of Andy's many hypotheses was that fractal geometry and the golden ratio may be required to solve quark confinement. Indeed, his hypothesis was similar to my hypothesis that fractal geometry and the golden ratio were required to decode things like genomes, proteomes, cancer, disease, and the super-symmetry of particle physics. Through our initial discussions, it became evident to me that if one could solve quark confinement, or at least decode key parts of it, then such discoveries and their resulting physical mechanisms could certainly be applied to further decode other unsolved problems in bioinformatics, immunology, and countless other disciplines. Our goals and interests were in alignment.

As Andy attacked a solution to quark confinement and worked at Karazin National University, he tutored people online in physics as a side hustle. Although he did not have a bunch of scientific publications in big fancy journals, I was impressed by his technical knowledge, creativity, open-mindedness, and how many of his ideas aligned with mine but were just expressed differently in different contexts. After our initial discussions, we came to an agreement: he would train me in physics and I would pay for his training, and together we would join forces to attack the mighty three-headed beast of quark confinement. Time to fire up the starship. ⛽🔥

Andy started sending me physics publications to learn and examine. Some of this was his work, but most of it was published by other scientists primarily involving experimental work and less theoretical work. After I read each paper, he and I got together to discuss it and share ideas. Both of us were visual learners, so we would draw pictures (a.k.a. "color plots") and send those back and forth for brainstorming and analysis. A picture was worth a thousand words, and for us this was an incredibly efficient way to communicate, especially since I did not speak Ukrainian, and English was not his primary language—not to mention the fact of being in time zones on opposite sides of the planet. On one hand, our knowledge and experience was totally different. Yet on the other hand, it was so much the same. In any case, both of us were energetic guys who knew how critical our work was. Our intense collaboration often resulted in disagreement and heated arguments, but we prevailed because we had a common goal. One thing I admired most about Andy is that he did not hold back or sugar coat his words. He spoke his mind and went for it. We were direct communicators and we didn't waste time. I worked to identify patterns in the experimental literature, wrote code to solve equations or model certain behavior, and (attempted to) tie everything together with maximum encoding efficiency and simplification—from the theoretical perspective of a software developer. I always kept Occam's razor and the pillars of object-oriented programming in mind. Andy's holographic ring in our dual 4D space-time topology of the confined baryon-antibaryon pair was an immensely flexible, powerful, and relatively simple framework that relied on fractals and satisfied the full gamut of experimental literature that we reviewed. In this effort, we began compiling the first draft for "Part One" of our quark confinement work, which would be the first paper of a series of papers that built a rigorous mathematical proof of quark confinement—at least that was our goal. This was the Scientific Method at work! 😎

By the time we neared the finalization of Part One, several months had gone by and what little financial savings I had was gone. My employment contract with BSU was done and we had a poor commercial fishing season. I had picked up some occasional work doing odd-end jobs in construction but it wasn't much. Though I did some odd-end jobs in software development, I tried to avoid doing hardcore paid software development to save my creative brain power for attacking quark confinement. Though jobs like construction and commercial fishing were hard physical work, they were straightforward mental work, which allowed me to generate and process ideas in my head during the physical work day and save my creative brain power for quark confinement until the evenings or weekends. Through this time, Marissa had graciously helped support me, and I also had some financial help from my grandparents and friends Mick and Jeff; I was so thankful for this. But as my financial struggles started to accumulate, I greatly wished that our commercial fishing season had gone better, and that our quark confinement research was funded, as my situation was not sustainable. This motivated me to maintain maximum effort to complete Part One—Andy and I worked tirelessly to do so. I believed that if we could get it published, then my chances (and our chances) of securing research funds for quark confinement and science in general would improve.

Although my financial situation was not good, it was not yet terrible—Andy's financial situation was worse. It was never clear to me, nor was it any of my business, to know the totality of his financial situation, but I did know that he didn't always have enough money to pay for food. This was a recurring challenge that we faced in our collaboration, as he was definitely suffering from hunger at times, and he asked for more money to help him beyond what I had agreed to pay him for the training. Seeing him suffer pained me. One one hand, I wanted to help him financially as much as I reasonably could, and I did. But on the other hand, it was never enough, because as time progressed, he kept asking for more money and I had to set a reasonable limit. At that time, I could not totally support myself—let alone another adult on the other side of the planet (even with the exchange rate from US currency to Ukraine currency). How could I give him something that I didn't have, especially when others were helping me as well? In any case, we pushed through to complete a final draft of Part One. Then we submitted it to the arXiv preprint archive and the journal Physical Review D. We were excited! But our situation was about to get worse.

I quickly discovered that—similar to the online science forums cool clubs—arXiv and Physical Review D also had their own little cool clubs. And man I'll tell you what: the folks at those places did not take kindly to our quark confinement paper, even though it was just Part One of a series and contained well-written mathematical and graphical content that connected a plethora of experimental data in a relatively simple framework. We went back and forth with them to defend our work but it was futile. They threw our paper away like it was garbage. On their website, the arXiv cool club claimed to be an open-access archive that promoted the dissemination of knowledge and supported the principles of open science with no peer review, but how could this be true when "arXiv moderation" immediately rejected a valid scientific paper by simply claiming that it was "inappropriate for arXiv" with no explanation? Meanwhile, Physical Review D claimed to be a leading journal in high-energy physics, but how could this be true when their referees also immediately rejected a valid scientific paper by simply claiming that it was inappropriate for their readership? Shouldn't their readership cool club be exposed to new ideas? For weeks we continued to battle the star destroyers but the outcomes were the same: they threw our paper away like garbage and, in many cases, insulted our work and treated us with disrespect and gave no useful feedback. This behavior seemed all too familiar—little online science cool clubs with their scientific elitism, censorship, groupthink, and hypocrisy—the apex of human achievement! 😎 🐒 🤣

As we continued battling the Dark Side and their star destroyers in a dire attempt to publish Part One, a terrible sequence of events unfolded: Andy's wife Larisa was robbed on a train, Andy had a stroke, and then he was fired from his job at Karazin National University. I knew this because Larisa contacted me directly and explained what happened. Andy survived the stroke, but he remained in critical condition at the hospital in Kharkiv.

A few days passed and I heard nothing from Andy nor Larisa. As I was working to set aside some money for food and medicine, suddenly Andy returned. But he was not the same man. The stroke had twisted and destroyed his mind. He went mad and started making all these baseless claims about me. Then he insulted me repeatedly. This was not the Andy I knew. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't his fault. These terrible torturous events that took place were beyond our control, and they were destroying a great man and his family.

As the next few days passed, I tried to keep up my hopes that Andy would at least partially regain himself to at least witness our Part One quark confinement paper get published at the Hadronic Journal (yes, we finally got it published), but he did not. In a desperate attempt to alleviate some of his suffering, I sent him some money for food and medicine, but it just made things worse: he began to threaten me by saying he was going to file an international lawsuit against me. Now of course these threats were all based on false bogus claims from somebody who just suffered a massive stroke, and thus would never hold up in court, but I couldn't afford to get bogged down in a lawsuit in any capacity, especially in the lengthy proceedings and high costs of international courts. At this point it was over. I chose to immediately terminate my interactions with Andy. He left me no choice.

Well, not long after, the threats diminished because Dr. Andrej "Andy" Inopin died from a heart attack. His suffering was over. He died fighting on the scientific battlefield with great honor. Thank you for everything, Andy. R.I.P. Your sacrifice for those you loved will not be forgotten.

[Episode VII] Battling the Dark Side: Round 3: The Death Star and the Santilli Mafia

I was never sure exactly when Andy passed away. I heard somewhat different stories from different sources. But in any case, sometime after his death, either his laptop was stolen and/or his email was hacked because I received some bizarre emails from his account written by someone claiming to be a Russian woman who knew Andy and had gained access to his email account. She contacted me and tried to get me to click on some Russian phishing link. I assume it was an attempt to trick me into installing spyware on my box to steal all of my data or something, but I can't be sure. Eventually Andy's online physics tutoring website disappeared from the world wide web and he had no additional digital footprints that I could detect; further evidence that supported his actual death. This final chapter of Andy's life was yet another mystery of the universe. In any case, I ignored the apparent Russian woman and her phishing attempts—it was time to move on.

So in the chaos, I somewhat glossed over the fact that our "Victory Paper"—namely Part One of our upcoming quark confinement series—was accepted for publication in the Hadronic Journal by the Hadronic Press. 🎉 There was no time to celebrate the grand achievement nor even process recent events. My financial situation was worsening: time and money were running out, and I had to either secure funds for my current scientific efforts or forget this tangential nonsense and shift back into my original passion and career of software development. I could have been out there developing software, making good money, and saving for my future. But instead I was embroiled in a surreal realm of insanity, uncertainty, debt, and death. 💀 My starship's shields were low and it was beginning to lose structural integrity. Chug... Chug... Chug... Decisions... Decisions... Decisions...

Now as I worked with the editors of the Hadronic Press to finalize Part One for publication, I met editor Dr. Christian Corda of Prato, Italy—a world-renowned Italian theoretical physicist with profound knowledge and experience with astrophysics, gravitation, and mathematical physics. Not only was he well-established and well-published, but he was also helpful and friendly. Imagine that! Furthermore, he was intrigued by Part One and eager to get it published. This was the validation I needed. Could Christian help me secure funding to attack my science projects? Though damage control systems were still activated and shields were still recharging, my starship was still fired up and moving forward toward my goal. 🚀

Initiated by our editing and publishing correspondence, my further discussions with Christian sparked a great opportunity to collaborate. Christian was actively working in multiple different sectors, and one of these was the creation of a new "black hole effective states" framework based on the introduction of new concepts—like "black hole effective temperature"—which moved beyond Hawking radiation to give a more accurate encoding of black holes and their interactions. Christian welcomed me to collaborate under him, along with his colleague Dr. Seyed Hossein Hendi of Shiraz University in Shiraz, Fars, Iran, and Hendi's former student and advisee Reza Katebi of Iran who was currently pursuing his M.S. degree in physics at California State University in Fullerton, California, USA. Together we combined forces and, under Christian's guidance, began working to further develop his new black hole framework. Though my hard work and contributions toward this joint operation was a volunteer effort, it was a great opportunity to grow, strengthen skills, and collaborate with new folks. Surely this was leading to an opportunity to secure funding to attack my science projects.

And fortunately, during this time, I was also able to pick up some more part-time work in commercial fishing and construction to help combat my financial struggles, reclaim my sanity, and throw some gas in the starship. ⛽🔥 Indeed my financial situation was not sustainable in the long term, but it was a temporarily viable "third option" because it did enable me to earn some cash doing physical work while conserving my brain power to attack the Death Star with the team. As I started becoming familiar with Christian's developments of black hole effective states, I hypothesized that there may be deep connections between his work and my work, and that eventually it may all be unified. I was thankful that my starship continued to maintain due course while blasting away at both the Death Star and the mighty three-headed quark confinement beast without running out of gas.

Now Christian held a number of positions in various scientific organizations around the world, and I couldn't begin to name them all. (Needless to say, he was a pretty popular well-known guy. 😎) Most of these were volunteer positions but one of these positions, namely the Editor-in-Chief of the Hadronic Journal, was a paid position. Thus, in this particular capacity, Christian worked under the Italian-American nuclear physicist (and Nobel Prize Nominee) Dr. Ruggero Santilli of Palm Harbor, Florida, USA—the founder and owner of the Hadronic Press.

Santilli had made some remarkable contributions to mathematics and science. For example, he created a new mathematical framework called "iso-mathematics" that extended conventional mathematics to include new algebraic structures called "iso-topies". Then he used iso-mathematics to create a new theoretical framework called "hadronic mechanics" that extended conventional mechanics to encode and characterize the behavior of hadrons (particles made up of quarks like protons and neutrons) and their interactions. Then he used hadronic mechanics to discover a new type of chemical species called "magnecules" and then he used magnecules to create a new type of clean-burning hydrogen-based fuel called "MagneGas", which was synthesized from human waste through a proprietary Plasma Arc Flow process invented by Santilli and his team at MagneGas Corporation (now called Taronis Technologies), and further developed and promoted technologies related to magnecules and other innovations at the publicly traded company Thunder Energies Corporation. In this particular realm, Santilli had proven himself to be a maverick scientist and innovator. I admired these achievements, and I was interested in further developing iso-mathematics and exploring my hypothesis that hadronic mechanics, my quark confinement framework, and Christian's black hole effective states framework may all be unified into a single framework with countless applications to engineering, computing, bioinformatics, medicine, etc. Indeed, this sounded like a worthy goal.

Now after reading about Santilli's achievements and talking to him some via email (during the Hadronic Journal publication process), my first take on him was like man, this was a misunderstood gentleman who got the job done despite the predominant scientific elitism, censorship, and groupthink practiced by the Dark Side. At face value, he seemed to be an honest man and a straight shooter who had learned the ineptitude and degeneracy of such practice and therefore would not engage in such practice himself. And despite the fact that the star destroyers of mainstream science had whole-heartedly and publicly rejected him, he prevailed in developing iso-mathematics, hadronic mechanics, and MagneGas from theoretical to experimental to industrial levels and henceforth proven himself to be highly competent, at least in that particular realm. But as I so thankfully learned from Christian early on in the game: Santilli had been driven mad by the Dark Side, and thus had become a force of the Dark Side himself; he became his own worst enemy. He also had a little fanboy cool club of his own—his own separate little faction of the Dark Side. This was the Santilli Mafia.

As Christian, Hendi, Reza, and I continued to hammer the Death Star to dutifully decipher its secret plans, I also started investigating iso-mathematics. To start, I was particularly intrigued by Santilli's iso-topic liftings and how they may be integrated with my (and Andy's) quark confinement topology and mechanisms to maintain confinement across all hadronic states, and then how Santilli's magnecules may be upgraded with "superfluid B phase correlated order parameters"—to name a couple examples of many. (My mind was exploding with so many ideas that I just couldn't keep up. 🤣) So I began to poke around with these things to examine the math, process the concepts, and generate some hypotheses. Then I started developing approaches to connect, improve, and integrate parts of the various works. Meanwhile, my looming financial challenges further drove my attempts to secure job funding and fuel the starship for this effort.

Now from Santilli's advancements of new industrial tech like his Plasma Arc Flow and MagneGas at MagneGas Corporation and Thunder Energies Corporation, Santilli had clearly made some money and had built out numerous additional interconnected organizations such as the Institute for Basic Research, R. M. Santilli Foundation, Hadronic Press, International Committee on Scientific Ethics and Accountability, and probably others that I wasn't aware of. (Important: Visit these links at your own risk.) All of these organizations worked together as a cartel. I was added to one of Santilli's mailing lists and I discovered that, through these organizations, Santilli was offering grant funds to folks to help boost advancements and applications in iso-mathematics, hadronic mechanics, and magnecules. It was right up my alley—a win-win—or so it seemed. I needed the money so I decided to apply for a grant.

Reza and I both discussed the grant opportunity with Christian. He warned us of the risks of making a deal with Santilli, but as we all recognized, there was also a potential for the pursuit of fundamental scientific work and achieving great outcomes with immense ROI. To me, the potential benefits greatly outweighed the risks, so I chose to start drafting a grant proposal. Reza did too.

As Reza and I worked together on our joint grant proposal and continued to attack the Death Star with Christian and Hendi, we all got to know each other more. Reza was very strong in physics and math. He wasn't as experienced as Christian or Hendi, but Reza knew a lot about physics (a lot more than me) and he was a fantastic character and fellow martial artist. While we were all versed in math and spoke this rigorous common language, the other three had strong backgrounds in physics where I did not, however, I had a strong background in computer science where they did not. And so together as a single combined force, we had a good strong diverse skill set with opportunities to learn, teach, and grow (although I'm pretty sure I learned a lot more from them than they did from me 😂). The more knowledge and experience I gained with physics, the more I realized how much computer science concepts—like object-oriented programming, coding theory, theory of computation, and data structures, etc.—could be leveraged to comprehend the universe, especially when considering things like the holographic principle and quantum computing (and their implications). I mean quite frankly, I viewed the acts of deciphering things like black holes, genomes, or hadrons as exercises in hacking software and breaking codes (ethical of course 😂). Was the universe just a gigantic naturally-occurring naturally-evolving quantum computer created by God? 🤣 Now that is something to wrestle with. In any case, needless to say, Reza and I were learning from the best and gaining great experience, which we intended to also use to help the Santilli Mafia take their STEM to the next level via this grant opportunity.

So yes, Reza and I finished our grant proposals and applied for the Santilli Mafia grants. In those proposals, we presented and discussed numerous hypotheses that we intended to investigate via the Scientific Method (ex. such as the aforementioned potential integrations and unifications of our various works and ideas). I didn't expect too much wheeling-and-dealing nor conflict because when it came to science and innovation, we all seemed to value the Scientific Method and share roughly similar goals, or so I thought. Though there was obvious risk, the opportunity really still seemed like a win-win to me.

After Santilli and some of his higher level cohorts (not Christian but others) on his shadow board of trustees reviewed our grant proposals, they responded back with disagreements based on our proposed hypotheses and approaches to improve, integrate, and unify aspects of his work with the work of others. To Santilli and his shadow board of trustees, this was not acceptable. It had to be all or nothing—the boss's way or the highway. We had to fundamentally accept his axioms, interpretations, and results, and thus begin the work from a biased standpoint, rather than staying true to the Scientific Method and investigating all of the axioms, interpretations, and results from the various works in their totality from an unbiased standpoint. Now Santilli did not totally disregard us and our grant proposal. He seemed to suggest that we could definitely work something out, but that it would take more time, effort, and discussion. Moreover, he invited us to further develop our ideas and proposals, and then meet up with him in person to discuss it. He even agreed to pay for the trip. Well, alrighty then Mr. Santilli. I had to play this one out.

In September of 2013 I travelled to the island of Rhodes, Greece to attend the International Conference for Numerical Analysis and Applied Mathematics (ICNAAM) at Rodos Palace Hotel to present my latest hypotheses, results, and grant proposal to the Santilli Mafia and various other scientists. There I met Reza, Christian, Mr. Santilli, and many others—including the brilliant U.K. physicist and gentleman Dr. Peter Rowlands who developed Nilpotent quantum mechanics. The Santilli Mafia funded our trips to the conference as part of a larger ongoing collaborative effort so we could all meet, present our various works, and find connections between our various works with intent to further develop iso-mathematics, hadronic mechanics, magnecules, etc.—or so they claimed. The conference was certainly no cake walk, as the days were long and intense, but fruitful and even somewhat friendly. (I did get a bit of time here and there to cruise around the vicinity of the Rodos Palace Hotel and even run some laps around the Ancient Stadium of Rhodes—the ancient Olympic site. 🤘😎) My presentations went well and the validation and feedback that I received on my work was motivating and helpful; it really seemed like things were headed in the right direction. Furthermore, my in-person interactions with Santilli revealed him as a seemingly credible scientist with straightforward intent, etc., and he said that Reza and I could obtain grant funding to further develop our work via the Scientific Method. So overall, while I still remained cautious of his hidden dark side (as warned by Christian), I was excited for this opportunity to earn funds for my efforts—no longer would my scientific endeavors be a volunteer effort—or so it seemed.

Now by this point, upon returning home from Greece, my planned one year attack to secure funding to work on my scientific hypotheses had just elapsed, and it was time to seriously evaluate my financial situation. Indeed my situation was not terrible—nothing like Andy's situation had been—and my experience at the 2013 ICNAAM had been overwhelmingly positive. I was in contact with Santilli and his shadow board of trustees, and I understood that the grant funding for Reza and I would begin any day. So I decided to keep pushing onward.

Not long after, Santilli changed his mind: he suddenly decided that our grant proposals needed more work. More specifically, he claimed that we needed to continue to develop the hypotheses and content within them because he did not agree with certain statements that were made. He regressed back to his original stance that we must blindly accept all of his axioms, interpretations, results as "true" and adopt a biased standpoint, rather than holding our ground on an unbiased standpoint to objectively consider all axioms and results via the Scientific Method in order to improve, integrate, and unify the various works. To Christian, Reza, and myself, this was unacceptable.

To the best of his ability, Christian thankfully helped guide Reza and I with our intense back-and-forth deliberations and disagreements with Santilli and his mafia. Meanwhile, Christian, Reza, Hendi, and I continued attacking the Death Star by publishing some new deciphered results in some top international journals. Additionally, I also kept publishing numerous papers through the Hadronic Journal and the journal Algebras, Groups, and Geometries to further investigate my hypotheses, develop my theories, and throw out some new ideas to the scientific world—some of these publications were just me and others were with Christian and Reza. (In doing so, I also continued part-time work doing commercial fishing and construction as needed.) While this period of my scientific effort was still just as a volunteer and riddled with frustrations and disagreements with the Santilli Mafia, it was also an extremely productive, exciting, and somewhat of a (short-lived) "golden age" for me.

As time progressed, our disagreements with the Santilli Mafia slowly degenerated into more heated disagreements. I also observed that the relationship between Christian (still the Editor-in-Chief of the Hadronic Journal) and Mr. Santilli deteriorated as well. In an apparent attempt to amend the situation, Santilli directed the Bulgarian mathematician Dr. Svetlin Georgiev to join Christian, Reza, and myself on a single team and merge our grant proposals into a single proposal. Svetlin had a strong mathematical background in topics like calculus and differential equations, and he was looking to extend some of these topics with iso-mathematics and write textbooks. So Christian, Reza, and myself began to share our ideas with Svetlin in order to merge the proposal.

Suddenly, during our team "collaboration" between the four of us, Svetlin backstabbed us and stole some of our ideas, and then he claimed that we were doing fake science while he was doing real science with all the good ideas. Fighting between us and Svetlin (and his emergent supporters) erupted through various mediums (ex. including email message lists that had many dozens or even hundreds of emails of professional scientists across the world, etc.). Upon slandering and libeling us repeatedly, Svetlin then convinced the Santilli Mafia's shadow board of trustees to reject Christian, Reza, and myself and terminate our grant proposal. Santilli appeared to allow himself to be ethically and morally divided but ultimately he made himself appear to be convinced by Svetlin's argument. Though in retrospect, all of this was just theater: Santilli used Svetlin as his "running dog" proxy spy puppet to infiltrate our research team, steal our ideas, defame us, and then reject us without grant payment.

Several more months went by. Christian, Hendi, Reza, and I continued to hammer the Death Star and earn a couple more black hole publications in top journals. Meanwhile, I continued my dire attempts to secure science funding as I worked various part-time jobs on and off. As the fall of 2014 neared, so did the 2014 ICNAAM on the island of Rhodes, Greece, and I'd been preparing a little surprise for Mr. Santilli: following my hypotheses, I began to develop a new framework that moved beyond Santilli's work by integrating and upgrading things like iso-electronium and magnecules with things like superfluid B phase correlated order parameters to encode fractional quantum Hall superfluid statistics—to name a couple. I intended to leave this mafia thug and his running dogs in the dust.

Now when it became time to plan for the 2014 ICNAAM, Santilli was still pretending to be somewhat friendly and straightforward to myself and Reza, while he simultaneously used his running dogs as proxy puppets to continually attack us from the side. Meanwhile, even though Christian was still technically working under Santilli, their rapidly deteriorating working relationship became more obvious to the public. In any case, Santilli still offered to pay for our trip to the 2014 ICNAAM to present our work, but this time was different than last time: Christian was only there for one day of the week-long conference, while Reza, Peter, and several other friendly scientists didn't return—they were done fighting with Santilli. By this point, I had scrapped the idea of getting grant funds and collaborating with the Santilli Mafia, but I had a different motivation: this time my intent was to prove Santilli wrong, in person, in front of his most loyal followers who never questioned or challenged him. My starship was fully charged and ready for battle.

The 2014 ICNAAM was night and day different from the 2013 ICNAAM. Though there were some absent folks and new folks, there were many familiar folks who had returned—some pleasant and some unpleasant. In any case, this year the conference was much less friendly and much more heated and aggressive. Santilli began to show more of his true colors in public. The fractal veins popped up in the little bald forehead of the two-faced Sith as his madness, ranting, and instabilities increasingly dominated the conference as we proceeded through the presentations—clearly some irritations were tearing at his mind. Needless to say, the mob boss was a little grouchy. 🤣 Many of the scientists at the conference were his subservient followers who believed that Santilli was the almighty "Messiah of Science" and they were there to simply study and regurgitate Santilli's work instead of questioning, challenging, and upgrading it.

As I patiently waited for my opportunity to blast Santilli with my presentation, the energy of his tyrannical stature was broken by the Ukrainian mathematician Dr. Stepan Moskaliuk — a courageous brilliant gentleman who was done being bullied by the madman and his mafia. Stepan stood up and, in a professional and direct manner, pointed out numerous flaws and shortcomings in Santilli's claims and reasoning. Then a fight erupted between them and, after having clearly won by making Santilli look even stupider in front of everyone, Stepan victoriously picked up his materials and walked out of the conference. Then Christian scientifically scrutinized Santilli's work on antimatter, gravitation, and cosmology—this really got Santilli fired up. 🤣 Christian and Santilli went back and forth for some time, where Christian pointed out additional flaws and shortcomings in Santilli's work. His veins were really popping out now. 🎆 Then the conference took a recess.

The recess ended and finally it was my turn to present. As I walked over to prepare the computer projector with my slides, I could sense fear and disgust on the faces of Santilli and his running dogs (like Svetlin and others). I saw right through their self-righteousness, ignorance, and dishonesty. I took center stage, wielded the powers of science, math, and imagination, and blasted them with new questions, hypotheses, ideas, results, and directions with a great potential for ROI. No longer would I be silenced or censored by the Dark Side. During my presentation, Santilli and his running dogs remained silent yet I could see the emerging expressions of surprise, defeat, and detest on their faces. I left those guys in the dust. My resounding victory received a vibrant applause across the wider audience of the conference, and Santilli had no choice but to bite the bullet and publicly admit that my work was valid and notable (even though I was just a volunteer with a lowly M.S. degree in computer science). My powerful upgraded magnecule blasters caused the Santilli Mafia's mighty planetary base to explode, leaving those grouchy Sith all strung out and squabbling amongst themselves in its ruins. Then I left the island of Rhodes, Greece with a smile on my face. My starship remained undamaged and fully charged.

My papers for my presentations in Greece were published in the American Institute of Physics 2014 ICNAAM Proceedings. With this amazing victory came great feelings that I will never forget. But despite my recent victory, there was still no grant funding opportunity for me to further attack this work. Yep, it was time to move on. That fall, I started teaching freshman courses in computer science and mathematics at BSU, while I earned a full-ride graduate assistantship at the Department of Mathematics to pursue a second M.S. in mathematics and develop cryptography (while commercial fishing in the summers). There was no opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, math, or physics for the academic sector and frankly I still remained passionate for hard-lined software development in the industrial sector. So as always, I continued to weigh my options as I moved forward and events unfolded. Even though I was still being shunned by some folks at BSU for my previous efforts, I still didn't care. This was an opportunity to further strengthen my math and software development skills beyond my adversaries, while getting paid to do so. My starship was moving forward at maximum velocity and prepping for an upgrade to shields and blasters.

[Episode VIII] Battling the Dark Side: Round 4: The Santilli Mafia Strikes Back and a Little Birthday Gift

Though the Death Star had sustained heavy damage from our assaults, it remained. We deciphered and published more of its secret plans to the scientific community, and our progress was accelerating, but due to financial issues I simply could no longer contribute maximum effort toward this operation, nor Part 2 against the three-headed quark confinement beast, nor the magnecule upgrades, etc. So as those efforts ramped down, my efforts toward math, cryptography, software development, and teaching at BSU ramped up so I could still maintain intense training and still feed myself at the same time.

Now do you remember those various email lists with many dozens or hundreds of addresses of scientists from around the world that were (to various degrees) familiar with, or associated with, the Santilli Mafia? My email inbox was exploding with insults and libel from the Santilli Mafia directed toward Christian, Reza, myself, and other individuals (like Stepan). By this point, it was further escalating because now Santilli himself was openly and directly attacking us, and had fired Christian from being Editor-In-Chief of the Hadronic Journal. Christian sent out emails to the mailing lists to inform everyone of his version of the story during the 2014 ICNAAM meltdowns and thereafter, leading up to his editorial job termination. This sparked further outrage across the mailing lists, websites, and forums. We kicked our defense into a higher gear and continued blasting back, but it was more akin to wasting energy by shooting lasers into an endless hungry black hole. The Dark Side was enlightening beyond belief. 🤣

The Santilli Mafia was well aware of my new position at BSU and they continued to defame me by posting on public websites, forums, and by contacting BSU directly in an attempt to terminate my employment. During my day-to-day work at BSU, there were a couple times when I randomly overheard other individuals mention the conflicts between the Santilli Mafia and myself, but nobody ever approached me directly on the subject, nor did BSU administrators or faculty attempt to impose any additional censorship, drudge up drama on past issues, etc. —it just didn't really come up. In this context, folks mostly kept to their own business and didn't hassle me, so I figured that any defamation or threats sent from the Santilli Mafia to BSU about me were largely ignored or disregarded (a wise decision on their part). Moreover, by this point I had already achieved numerous additional publications in both top international journals and some smaller journals, so I had proven myself to be more credible in the eyes of BSU administrators and faculty (even though I just had a lowly M.S. degree 🤣), despite how some folks had previously behaved. In any case, as long as the "forbidden science censorship folks" stayed out of my way so I could get real work done, I didn't care. 🚀 But of course the Dark Side always had to take things to the next level.

The most repulsive, outspoken, foul-mouthed member of the Santilli Mafia was this greedy, detestable, racist, anti-semitic, delusional, psychopath named Luca Petronio—Santilli's running dog who was in charge of the International Committee on Scientific Ethics and Accountability (a degenerate, hateful committee which of course behaved in the exact opposite of what it claimed to stand for). On this committee's (now-disabled) website ScientificEthics.org (archive), Luca's job was to post garbage nonsense and lies to defame scientists who dared to question, challenge, or improve any aspect of Santilli's work. Thus, in addition to spamming our email inboxes with hateful garbage messages, Luca made a special defamation web page just for Christian, Reza, and myself—see archive if you have the patience and stomach for it, or if you just want a good laugh. 😂 Furthermore, Luca and Santilli both claimed to have hired an international private detective agency that was using cutting-edge CIA-like electronic and surveillance technology to dig up a bunch of personal and private info on Christian, Reza, and I to allegedly steal our emails, spy on us, etc. to compile large dossiers to prepare for pending legal actions against us in civil and criminal courts in the USA and Italy. Additionally, the Santilli Mafia falsely claimed that we were fanatic Jewish physicists threatening their lives and suppressing scientific democracy as part of a large-scale effort orchestrated by an international group of Jewish physicists who were hell-bent on controlling and forbidding knowledge. Thus, they claimed to need protection from the FBI and other law enforcement organizations in the USA and Italy.

Now I had previously experienced scientific elitism, censorship, suppression of scientific democracy, and forbidden knowledge at online science forums, scientific journals, and BSU—especially when it came to the physical application of things like the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, and fractals—so it was not a stretch for me to imagine groups of bullies running going around these "playgrounds" to shut people down and threaten them, I mean children had been doing that in elementary school since the beginning of time. 😂 But to demonstrate such extreme anti-semitism, to blame all this on Jews, and to claim that we were Jews threatening them because we were trying to apply the Scientific Method to Santilli's work was absolute garbage nonsense beyond measure. Someone teach these boys some manners!

In any case, in response to the escalating defamation and threats from the Santilli Mafia, we planned to further defend ourselves and retaliate with 3 courses of action simultaneously:

1. to take responsive action in civil and criminal courts,
2. to report our situation to journalists, and
3. to make a happy little birthday present for Mr. Santilli. 🎁

So long story short... As Christian, Reza, and I began documenting our battles with the Santilli Mafia, we reported to numerous journalists and requested help investigating, documenting, and communicating all this, but surprisingly none of them responded. No help there. Meanwhile, motivated by truth, revenge, and self-preservation, Christian, Reza, and I worked—in all of our "free time"—to create a fun little present for Santilli's 80th birthday: a beastly scientific paper titled "Confusion in Gravitation and Cosmology" that identified and discussed numerous flaws and shortcomings of Mr. Santilli's statements, ideas, and interpretations of antimatter, gravitation, and cosmology. Because although Santilli did have some interesting hypotheses and amazing achievements with things like iso-mathematics, hadronic mechanics, and magnecules, not everything that he said or did was scientifically valid and thus deserved some of our attention. In any case, I wish I could've seen the expression on Santilli's face when he received the email with our "Confusion in Gravitation and Cosmology" paper published in a top international journal (see publications page for the free pre-print link). 🎁🔥🤣 And while we did receive redacted copies of apparent letters sent from the Santilli Mafia to various legal attorneys, we were never contacted directly by any of their attorneys or law enforcement (to the best of my knowledge), so I suspected that either no one would pick up the cases or the redacted copies of the letters were totally fake. 🤣 While it was a long shot, I did contact a former colleague of mine who worked at the U.S. NSA to see if I could learn more about the Santilli-Luca Mafia situation and possibly get some help with doing a threat assessment of their actual technological and surveillance capabilities, but that never amounted to the discovery of any new useful information. In any case, thereafter, Luca's detestable yet humorous little libel commode at ScientificEthics.org (archive) was disabled, likely due to legal action from someone somewhere. 🚽🔥🤣

[Episode IIX] Hunting Super-Symmetry

As I hammered away for 80-90 hours per week to attack my math M.S. thesis, further strengthen my math skills, and instruct freshman courses in math and computer science at BSU (while commercial fishing in the summers), the idea of applying a fractal self-similar super-symmetry to achieve maximal encoding efficiency in various energetic structures throughout the universe remained fundamentally seared in my consciousness. My thesis focused on cryptography, which was right down my alley because cybersecurity was one of those "magical disciplines"—with limitless real-world applications—that had fueled my drive to learn computers and software development since childhood. By this point, I had chosen not to pursue a Ph.D. and, upon finishing my second M.S., was planning to go into the software development industry full-time while continuing my science projects as a part-time volunteer hobby to maximize scientific freedom with no strings attached. Moreover, I viewed things like quark confinement, black holes, magnecules, genomes, and proteomes as energetic structures that could be further comprehended and deciphered through a cryptographic lens, especially since the design and engineering of cryptographic algorithms and systems was based on algebraic structures—like groups, rings, and fields—that also applied to physics. Thus, my intent of such training and development was to kill multiple birds with one stone. 🪨🐦🐦🐦😂

For my cryptography thesis, I worked under the advice of Dr. Liljana Babinkostova, a brilliant lady who was an expert in cryptography and finite algebraic structures. Liljana had introduced me to latin squares, where I learned that latin squares encode features of algebraic structures. (A sudoku puzzle is a specific type of latin square, but this was no game. 🤣) For this, I began developing mathematical and computational approaches to generate such algebraic structures and analyze their features with "latin square tests". If an algebraic structure passed certain latin square tests, then it became a candidate for use in the construction of cryptographic systems to protect against increasingly powerful cyber attacks. In doing so, I was also learning how to do computations and develop cryptographic systems beyond classical "base 2" binary computing into generalized "base p" p-ary computing (where p is any prime number), which I hypothesized to be the future of quantum computing and quantum cryptography over geometric lattice dynamics (ex. think starting from the quark-antiquark confinement over the six-coloring kagome lattice and expanding out from there with long range superfluid B phase order parameter correlations with fractal quasi-particle collective excitations and geometric structures like trits and tetrahedrons when p = 3 or something, etc.). This training and development was thrilling and intense, though the latin squares did remind me of the puzzle games from the Bruce Willis movie Mercury Rising. 😂 So far during this effort, I saw no hint or trace evidence of fractals or self-similarity in such structures, even though I was looking for it everywhere. The hunt was on.

In the midst of my efforts, Liljana introduced me to a fellow student named Will Unger who became interested in latin squares and my work. Will and I had a somewhat similar computer science and math educational background, and he was a local Idaho resident who was working toward a Ph.D. in computer science with a cybersecurity emphasis. Will offered to help with parts of my latin square work and we began to collaborate. Generating, testing, and classifying latin squares involved numerous computationally expensive processes, so Will helped me battle the computational bottlenecks with the design and implementation of numerous more efficient algorithms to evaluate and classify increasingly bigger latin squares and deliver more results. Indeed, Will and I had many great discussions on latin squares, and this joint operation primarily consisted of eating pizza, drinking coffee, solving problems, and programming computers. Good times. Cowabunga! 🍕

One afternoon, as Will and I pushed onward in our effort and were tossing around some ideas involving latin squares, one of our computer jobs finished executing and we began to examine the results. One interesting observation that we had was that, for a given size of latin square where the size was a prime power p^d for prime p and positive integer d, there was a certain class of latin squares that passed a certain latin square test for what seemed to exhibit maximum coding efficiency. And what happened next was unbelievable to me beyond measure: we discovered that these latin squares with maximum coding efficiency were in fact the Cayley tables of Galois fields (finite fields) and they algebraically and geometrically exhibited a self-similar super-symmetric structure. Will and I were shocked. And these self-similar super-symmetric latin squares for finite fields with maximum encoding efficiency for cryptographic systems immediately reminded me of my fractal super-symmetry hypothesis in particle physics, which then suggested to me a refinement of my hypothesis: fractals and finite fields may be required to efficiently and accurately decode the super-symmetry of the hierarchy problem in particle physics, which then would have direct application to decoding genomes and proteomes (with quasi-particles and collective excitations on a triangular or tetrahedral lattice or something) to improve, for example, things like modern medicine or shockwave therapy or starship warp drives. The hunt was successful! 💡🔥🤣

I wrote up the self-similar super-symmetric latin square finite field results which were eventually published in my thesis "Latin Squares and Their Applications to Cryptography" in December of 2016. Due to the scope of my thesis, I did not write up a bunch of content connecting these results to my fractal super-symmetry hypothesis in physics, but I did note the suggested importance of quantum latin squares, which has applications to quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and the mighty universe—not to mention potential applications to things like warp drives, genomes, proteomes, medicines, and more. Oh RPenner, Santilli, Svetlin, Luca, and all you other monsters of the Dark Side who treated me so well, thank you all so much for your kind words and actions that motivated me over the years—for if it wasn't for you, who knows where I would be. 🤪

[Episode IX] Engineering, Family, and the 8-Year Science Pause

After I finished my M.S. in math, I decided to keep teaching freshman at BSU for one more semester as I interviewed for local software development engineering jobs to pursue my original passion. As a fun little side project, I also competed in the FQXi physics essay context by publishing a paper on a team with Christian and Reza. This was the last science paper that I would publish before taking a break from my science projects.

In June of 2017 I took a software development job at a local Boise startup. It was a great place to work and I helped build some powerful software used by folks around the world. Then my life changed in the best of ways when my daughter was born. ❤ Though not long after she was born, the startup took some hard financial hits, one of the big products got sold off, and a bunch of us got let go. 💀 Having a new baby with no severance and no job was a challenging time, but thankfully I soon found a new great team to work with at another local Idaho company that had recently exploded to ~800 employees and was continuing to grow. Thankfully the Boise metro area was booming with good jobs and a strong workforce.

Though the latest company was rapidly growing and serving many hundreds of thousands of customers around the USA, it was suffering from some monstrous technical debt, scalability issues, and highly complex technical problems involving some wicked temporal logic (with complexity that rivaled anything that I had ever worked on before in science or engineering, and yes this includes black holes 🤣). Determined to put customers first, help strengthen the company, and reduce my chances of getting let go (again), I worked hard under intense pressure to help the business overcome considerable technical debt, revolutionize their automated testing, and create new cutting-edge software solutions to achieve speed, flexibility, and accuracy for customers that had never been implemented before—not to mention the added challenges of the infamous covid years. In doing so, I earned 2020 Employee of the Year and worked my way up the ranks to become a senior software development engineer to lead attacks against some beastly technical problems. Then my son was born and my life was further transformed. ❤

This hard-lined software development was a great opportunity to really dig in and master full-stack skills. Eventually the local Idaho company got acquired by a Fortune 20 giant to become a subsidiary. Then the subsidiary got further restructured and the IT department (that I currently work for) got separated from the subsidiary and sold again to a different company—all while doing the same job on the same team for the same customers. 🤷😂 In any case, here I continue to stand as a full-stack developer and I still love writing code just as much as when I started so many years ago. In this realm of industrial software development, there were (and still are) many people who I admire and respect, and I'm thankful for the opportunities to learn from others, teach others, practice the growth mindset, and have a satisfying job that is never boring. Meanwhile, my hunger for science never wavered as I patiently waited for the right time to resume my science projects.

[Episode X] Back in Action

Today I play with my kiddos as much as possible and I work hard in software development for typically 40 hours per week (sometimes more). This is nothing like the 80-90 hours per week that I did for many years. So nowadays I have some intermittent free time during some late nights to resume my science projects as a part-time unpaid hobbyist. It's been 8 years since I paused science, and even though I'm a little rusty on parts of the science itself, my overall problem solving game is stronger than ever. I never intended to take such a long break, but life happens and priorities change. In any case, it's time to return to science, and this is why I founded Cold Hammer R&D in early 2025. So get your game face on, gas up the starship, and let's get some work done. ⛽🔥😎🚀👍

Note: To this day, to the best of my knowledge, the super-symmetry of particle physics still does not implement finite fields, at least at its core. But my refined hypothesis (based on discoveries from my cryptography thesis published in 2016) suggests that, in order to achieve maximal encoding efficiency for such energetic structures, we may need to implement finite fields in the core of super-symmetry (ex. over some kind of tetrahedral lattice structure, etc.). With shields and blasters charged up, I certainly plan to take my starship over there for a visit, to name one of many. 🏀🚀🤣

Finally, after working late nights for a few weeks, I'm back in action with a new paper titled "The Tri-Quarter Framework: Unifying Complex Coordinates with Topological and Reflective Duality across Circles of Any Radius". It is freely available in preprint form and is currently being reviewed by a journal. See publications for more details.

I also used Gemini AI to scour the web and generate a report that summarizes my research work. (Note: A text-only version is available here.) Stay tuned!