Member

My professional career covered 49 years as a rocket scientist, missile engineer, and weapons technologist. Einstein, Fermi, Oppenheimer and Teller used their experiences in physics to develop weapons. Conversely, I utilized my background in weapons science and technology to pursue theoretical physics. The following provides brief details on how my career in weapons profoundly contributed to several new concepts in physics. Progress in understanding weapons, physics, and other subjects is grouped by decades. A list of 31 discoveries, predictions and observations about physics and the design of the universe appear at the end.

1950s: I reported for active duty in November 1953 as a 22-year old Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force at the Powerplant Laboratory of the Wright Air Development Center in Dayton, Ohio shortly after I completed work on my Masters Degree (thesis on cellulose chemistry) in chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas. My first military assignment was a project covering the research and development (R&D) of special fuels. The Korean War was coming to an end and the Cold War was heating up. My project grew from $20 thousand per year to $20 million per year in two years. The Air Force had decided to build an intercontinental missile system called the Navajo to carry a 10,000 pound nuclear warhead, which at the time was the state-of-the-art. The carbon-hydrogen-boron fuel, which I named the carborane family of compounds and described in an article published in the journal of the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE) in 1958, increased the range of the ramjet-powered Navajo to reach 50 percent more targets. I attended some meetings with Herbert C. Brown (Nobel Prize, 1979) who was an expert in organoborane chemistry. When my two-year military tour ended in 1955, the Air Force asked me to work as the civilian Senior Project Engineer on Project HEF, which was the short name of the High Energy Fuel program. During the next three years over $200 million were invested in this program. During the 1950s I made a number of trips to the Malta Test Site in up-state New York, where Neil Munch worked in rocket propulsion. We never met then. I began a practice while in the Air Force that would continue over my entire career. No matter what technical project I was assigned to, I would study the relevant fundamental physics.

In the fall of 1955, I attended an on-base orientation seminar on the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program, an experimental effort to demonstrate the use of a nuclear reactor to power an airplane. Attendance was mandatory for all Air Force officers working in R&D. This seminar motivated me to learn more about theoretical physics. It was purely coincidental that I developed this interest in the same year that Einstein died. I did some further study and submitted an essay for the ?Annual Award for Essays on Gravity? sponsored by the Gravity Research Foundation in 1957 and another in 1958. On looking back, my essays were na?ve and superficial, but they were the start of a lifelong interest in theoretical physics. The essays were also a prescient agenda for the next 30 years. While at Wright Air Development Center I took part-time graduate courses at Ohio State University, which were taught on base. After careful thought, I left the Air Force in the fall of 1958 to work full-time on a PhD in chemical engineering at Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio. I soon completed my remaining course requirements and worked primarily on laboratory experiments from 1959 to 1961. I left the campus to work in Washington, DC, and registered with Ohio State University for the minimum required hours from 1961 to 1964 until my dissertation was accepted and I graduated in June 1964.
What happened to the Navajo? A breakthrough in lowering the warhead weight and an alternative program called the Atlas missile made the Navajo obsolete. The Navajo and the special fuels program were terminated while I was in graduate school. A disastrous flood hit Columbus, Ohio from 19 to 21 January 1959. This event changed my life forever. My wife and I and our five-month old son were among over 5,000 people that were driven from their homes by the rising water. The flood went over our home. On the 20th of January the Columbus paper showed a tip of a house above the flood waters of Alum Creek. That was my home. While cleaning up the mess caused by the flood, I realized that I had not had any courses in the humanities or literature during six years of full-time college and three years part-time. I decided to study philosophy on my own, while simultaneously working on my PhD in chemical engineering. 1960s: The subject of my PhD dissertation was Investigation of Methane and Methane- Steam Reactions in an Argon Arc Plasma. This topic required extensive study of the Maxwell equations, discharge phenomena, plasmas, ozone and the Lorentz force, all good physics topics. My experimental apparatus, which I designed and fabricated using funds provided for me by a National Shell Fellowship, would hum, gurgle and fill the laboratory with a spectacular fluctuating blue light when it was operating. The head of the Chemical Engineering Department, Joseph Koffolt, often asked me to run an experiment during tours of prospective students. I empirically defined a new reaction rate function for the generation of acetylene at very high temperatures. Concurrent with my PhD studies, I had a consulting contract on magnetohydrodynamics, which has some as yet unfulfilled potential for rocket propulsion. Magnetohydrodynamics is the study of the flow of electrically charged particles in an intense magnetic field.

I started work in late 1961 for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon in Washington, DC in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was organized then under different projects. It was ironic that I was assigned to Project Principia, which had a goal of developing advanced propellant concepts. My title was Program Manager with responsibilities for internal ballistics, combustion phenomena, and hybrid rocket technology. I established a national committee to resolve a combustion instability problem in the Saturn booster motor, investigated a Polaris propellant problem, developed a propellant combustion model of my own, and restructured programs on herbicides and defoliants. People inside and outside of ARPA began to recognize that I possessed an aptitude for starting new programs as well as resolving problems in existing programs. I initiated an extensive hybrid rocket program that was reported in Missiles and Rockets in 1962. Other programs included establishment of propulsion research centers at Princeton University and the University of Utah and a propellant test facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. One of the professors at Princeton, Martin Summerfield, had worked with Robert Goddard to develop the first American rockets. I had a long association with Summerfield, in spite of events that were about to happen.

A totally unexpected political decision (reported in the media before our office knew about it) was made by ARPA in 1964 to terminate Project Principia and release all the employees associated with the project. My job was terminated on Friday?the following Monday I was working for the Army Research Office in Arlington, Virginia and quickly became involved with the Army explosives research program. The chairman of the advisory committee for this program was Peter Debye (Nobel Prize, 1936), with whom I spent some time.

Due to a glitch that was overlooked in my sudden transfer to the Army, the Army Research Office had assigned me to a position which belonged to a person having re-employment rights from overseas. The problem was solved by transferring me to the European Research Office in Frankfurt, Germany in August 1966. I became Chief of the Chemistry and Energy Conversion Branches and responsible for managing 20-25 research contracts on such topics as catalysis, fuel cells, macromolecular chemistry, metal alkyls, protonic conduction in polymers, poly-acetylenes, and transport phenomena with universities in Austria, England, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy and Scotland, and had to visit them regularly. One of my contractors in Italy was Giulio Natta (Nobel Prize, 1963), whom I visited on two occasions. During my 48 months in Frankfurt, I wrote 46 technical reports describing work by contractors, information presented by others at international conferences, and new developments in technology. These reports were distributed to about 300 people within the United States and some reports were archived in the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) database.

My job in the European Research Office gave me the opportunity to travel extensively and to have some intense intellectual discussions with world-class scientists. I returned to the study of physics and wrote reports in 1967, 1968, and 1969 on the effects of acceleration on particles. I realized later that these reports had some flaws, but they provided training for the future. My studies on philosophy did come to fruition with the development of a general theory of knowledge. I presented papers at the Third International Congress on the Logic, Philosophy, and Methodology of Science in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1967 and at the 14th International Congress of Philosophy in Vienna, Austria in 1968, which hosted a reunion of the ?Vienna Circle? of logical positivism. I met Karl Popper at this congress. Mario Bunge from McGill University in Canada, the chairman of my session, had just published a book in 1967 on the Foundations of Physics, Volume 10 in the Springer Tracts on Natural Philosophy. I bought and read this book.

1970s: The Army European Research Office in Frankfurt, Germany was closed down in June 1970 and operations were moved to London England. I was transferred back to the Army Research Office in Arlington, Virginia and experienced the chaos of downsizing from the Vietnam War, which resulted in six different jobs in five years. For a short time, I worked on high energy lasers, also known as directed energy weapons, where I met Charles Townes (Nobel Prize, 1964). From mid-1972 to mid-1974, I was Chief of the Technology Overview and Coupling Team, an odd sounding job, which had the mission to define how all Army investments in science and technology (S&T) of about a billion dollars a year paid for itself. My team had six top-notch Army officers and an excellent secretary. We called ourselves the magnificent seven and adopted the motto of Res secunda prima because we were constantly being ordered to do tasks not within our mission. The team agreed on a criteria and prepared Corporate Reports I and II, which described how the Army had a return of 3-4 times its annual S&T investment based upon documented cost avoidance and cost savings confined to a three-year period. No one believed our findings until we explained all the nitty-gritty details. The critics went away and used our criteria. I worked directly for a Major General who asked me to ghostwrite 16 speeches in 18 months. One speech, which was reprinted twice, developed a new mission area analysis approach for weapons systems.

Good fortune fell my way when I was selected as the only Army civilian to attend the National War College at Fort McNair in Washington, DC during the 1974-1975 academic year. The mission of the National War College then was to instruct promising civilians (GS-15 level) and military officers (Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels), including women, from all the military services and all branches of the Federal Government about the organization, operation and issues of the nation-state. We attended lectures by senor leaders from government (civilian and military), industry, academia and service organizations and a group of eight students met with each lecturer and discussed national and international issues with them. The average age of the 134 students was 44. The world was divided into five regions and members of the class specialized in a specific region. In the spring of 1975 the different groups traveled to the regions and met with the Heads of State of the various countries. Many of the members of my class became generals, admirals, senior executives, ambassadors, and some were elected to Congress. I wrote an independent research paper (dissertation) on The Philosophic Limits of Political Choice which was selected as one of the top three student studies of the class. Preparation of this research study gave me the opportunity to update my general theory of knowledge (I presented a version of this theory at the 13th NPA -2006). At the end of the academic year, I was also cited as a distinguished graduate (upper ten percent) and returned to the Army in August 1975 and soon received a double promotion to be the Science Advisor to the Director of Weapons Systems. This promotion made me the manager of all science and technology support of the Army weapons modernization program including ground combat vehicles, helicopters, missiles, field artillery, small arms, and parachutes. In annual on-site program reviews at all the relevant Army laboratories, the Director of Weapon Systems made me his spokesman in his absence. I was able to contribute to many of the Army weapons that were later deployed in Operation Desert Storm. I also became a national leader in coordinating all United States programs in precision guided munitions by organizing the Joint Services Guidance and Control Committee. I quickly resolved in two weeks a major propellant issue with the Trident missile which had troubled the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Navy and the Army for two years.

The first few months on the job as Science Advisor were more stressful than I had anticipated. One morning in December 1975 I was on my way to work in the Pentagon and got stuck in a traffic gridlock and discovered the true meaning of road rage. I started analyzing the demands being made upon me by my new job. After about 30 minutes, I thought of a familiar rocket equation that mathematically explained my feelings under pressure. All the variables seemed to fall into place. I called my approach the feeling formula. Feelings/emotions depend upon a given situation and are a function of a control factor times the perceived logarithm of time in seconds for the situation. After some study to understand human emotions better, I began using the formula and the stress went away. (The feeling formula was the focus of papers presented at the 11th NPA-2004 and the 13th NPA-2006.).

My new job as Science Advisor required about twenty trips a year. This travel gave me time to renew my interest in theoretical physics. In a few months I derived force laws for the strong force and the zero point radiation force that suggested redefinition of the four fundamental forces in September 1976. Shortly thereafter, my efforts led to the identification of a specific superforce magnitude that had been overlooked in Einstein's general theory of relativity. I presented a paper at a AAAS meeting in Denver and one at the University of Mississippi, both during 1977. Gell-Mann (Nobel Prize, 1969) also presented at the Denver meeting. A colleague of Gell-Mann sat next to me at the conference dinner and I explained my theory. His reply was a classic that still rings in my ears, ?Your theory does not look like the theory that we expect it to be when we discover it.? My 1977 talks lead to a publication in the first issue of Speculations in Science and Technology in 1978. 1980s: As Science Advisor (title later changed to Technology Manager for Weapons Systems), I was often required at a moment's notice to explain how any one out of 200 missiles in the world worked. I did a lot of fumbling and mumbling until I devised a simple schematic technique, called Heastographs by others, to explain all the frequencies required from target detection to target impact and the relationships between missile, missile launcher and target. This technique was taught in some Army Reserve units. I co-authored a Handbook of Precision Guided Munitions that was published in 1983 to describe this technique and other basic characteristics of guided weapons. This handbook has been distributed in over 50,000 copies and was reprinted surreptitiously in Chinese.

In 1983 the Office of the Secretary of Defense asked me to change positions and be responsible for all Department of Defense weapons science and technology (bombs, bullets, mines, torpedoes, missiles, small arms, fire control systems, and weapons effects). I had to become an international authority on precision guided weapons as the US member of a NATO Research Study Group on Air Defense and the US Principle Representative for Weapons Technology to The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP) involving Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States (called the ABCA group). Once again, I was in over my head. Then, I remembered that I had developed a philosophical model of the technological process when I was with the Army. I adapted my model and called it The Management Experiment, which I used effectively to lead and to manage a billion dollars a year of science and technology spread over 27 military installations. In 1984 I recognized the need for advanced electronic components for future missiles, communications, and space operations and developed such a strong justification for this need that I was authorized to organize and chair a national committee which visited 25 companies, universities, and laboratories to find out what technology was possible. My committee recommended a $700 million program on integrated circuits to an Assistant Secretary of Defense in 1985. The program was approved, eventually funded, initiated as planned, and was by all accounts in later publications an outstanding success and was used as a model to address other technologies. An early spin-off of this program was a chip that made the cell-phone possible.

I began the decade with a physics presentation at the annual Army Science Conference in 1980 at West Point, which was published in the proceedings as the ?Redefinition of the Four Fundamental Forces?. It was the first time that I used this title. Someone in the audience commented, ?I'll never believe what you have to say about your forces until you derive all of them from potentials.? Within two weeks I had derived a new mathematical definition of the concept of force starting with a scalar potential, a field constant and common way to derive all conservative forces. It took me two years to work out all the bugs before I presented the results at a AAAS meeting in Washington, DC in 1982. Steven Weinberg (Nobel Prize, 1979) talked about a Lagrangian over the world using the standard model at the same AAAS meeting. While listening to Weinberg's talk, I scribbled a derivation using my redefined forces that converged on the same correlations predicted by Weinberg. A question I asked Weinberg about the Planck scale is recorded at the end of his talk. After his talk, Weinberg stepped off the stage and came over to me to continue talking about the Planck scale. Later in 1982, I spoke at a seminar at the University of Mississippi. The latter presentation was published in 1983 in Speculations in Science and Technology. Reviewing the literature on the concept of force made me realize that I needed to summarize what I had read on the evolution of the concept of force from 1600 to 1950. I gave a presentation on this review in February 1986 to the Physics Department of the University of Mississippi and a couple of days later gave a talk on the Department of Defense Basic Research Program to the overall faculty of the University of Mississippi.

1990s: I retired from the Department of Defense in 1987 and became Director of the Guidance and Control Information Analysis Center (GACIAC) in Chicago. Illinois. GACIAC operated under a contract between the IIT Research Institute and the Army. Our mission was to manage a comprehensive database on weapon's technology, perform studies, serve as Secretary to the Joint Services Guidance and Control Committee, and run conferences. The job as Director of GACIAC required a lot of organizing and writing. I edited 39 technical conference proceedings, 13 special technical reports based upon specific themes, 5 topical state-of-the-art reports, and 3 handbooks in eight years. Edward Teller was the keynote speaker at one of the conferences on highrobert@ temperature superconductors. I transcribed his talk and corresponded back and forth with Teller until he finally agreed to the paper that was published in the proceedings. In addition, I served as President of the Chicago area chapter of the SPIE Optical Society. I also wrote 48 Field-of-View editorials that were about 2,000 to 3,000 words long summarizing the state-of-the-art of guidance and control, automatic target recognition, nanoscience, electromagnetic spectrum, information databases (including early stages of the Internet), software, military programs, Department of Defense management process, optics, and others. Four editorials were reprinted by other organizations. These editorials were a staple of the GACIAC Bulletin, a 16 to 20-page newsletter, which was distributed to a mailing list of about 8,000 addressees. In 1999, the mission of GACIAC was redefined and consolidated into a Department of Defense program operating out of Washington, DC.

Since my office was on the Chicago campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), I regularly attended seminars in the Physics Department and spoke at them. One of the IIT talks on the superforce was published in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences in 1990 and updated for Galilean Electrodynamics in 1991.

Back in 1981, while attending a meeting on weapons technology, I noticed a crease where I had folded a page of a report to mark my place. The line made by the crease looked like a plot of log force versus log distance that I had drawn on graph paper. Suddenly I realized that I could redefine the four fundamental forces by folding a piece of paper ? la origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. I gave a talk on Origami and the Design of the Universe at the Argonne National Laboratory in 1996. Origami is an excellent tool to reveal new interactions of the redefined fundamental forces.

While still working as Director of GACIAC, I was appointed in 1993 to be a pro bono member of the Board of Army Science and Technology (BAST) under the National Academies. This board conducts studies, reviews various science and technology programs of the Army, and offers an assessment, usually accompanied by a number of options for future action. I served until 2001 and attended an average of four meetings a year, often held at different locations around the country. I prepared a part of one of their published studies on air and space defense in the 21st century. Altogether, I served as a national and international leader of efforts on precision guided munitions from 1976 to 2001, when I retired to write full-time.

During a briefing to the National Academies board in 1996 about the average feature sizes of electronic components, I realized that I had a model that could show a pattern in these feature sizes. The pattern also could be tied to the growing interest in nanometer technology. I co-authored a paper ?Theoretical Predictions of Nanometer Phenomena? and presented it at the Fifth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in 1997. I met Richard E. Smalley (Nobel Prize, 1996) at this conference. While listening to a different briefing in 1998 to the BAST on frequencies required for future military operations, I realized that the electromagnetic spectrum could be defined theoretically in terms of a discrete series of bands that were a function of the square-root of the fine structure constant. I wrote an editorial on the theoretical structure of the electromagnetic spectrum for the GACIAC Bulletin in 1999 and gave talks at the University of Alabama in 2003, and at the University of Connecticut in 2005 (12th NPA). 2000s: Altogether, I prepared and published 20 papers on theoretical physics from 2000 to 2008. During 2005, I became editor of the Natural Philosophy Alliance Newsletter. The Natural Philosophy Alliance (NPA) had its 15th annual meeting at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM in April 2008. This group involves a few hundred scientists from four continents. I also gave talks on psychology and philosophy at some of the NPA meetings. I now spend the majority of my time on writing. The story continues. I must still speak for my work?September 2008.

DISCOVERIES/PREDICTIONS BY ROBERT J. HEASTON

During the course of my life I discovered, defined, derived, or developed the following 31 theoretical physics concepts. I seriously doubt that I could have developed these concepts without my professional experience in weapons technology. The concepts are briefly listed, with year and month of initial concept, year of first publication and year when presented to NPA, in parentheses. My goal since joining NPA in 2003 has been to bring all of my ideas to closure, but new observations have surfaced in the process. As far as I know, none of my concepts have been accepted by the mainstream media, although a number of the concepts could be validated or disproved by experimental tests that have not been performed. Concepts noted with an asterisk {*} have not been fully presented to the NPA.

1. Developed a model of Lorentz contraction as a relativistic three-dimensional contraction-expansion process; Lorentz ?supposed? the occurrence of contraction only in the direction of translation (Oct 1967, 1967, 12th NPA-2005).
2. Hypothesized (quantum surface hypothesis) that every particle has a surface that spins constantly at the speed of light; the Bohr magneton, de Broglie wave-particle duality, Maxwell equations, and Einstein general relativity theory all imply the existence of a quantum surface (Oct 1967, 1978, 12th NPA-2005).
3. Predicted that the Schr?dinger wave function is the probability of a particle being within its rest-mass volume (Oct 1967, 1978, 12th NPA-2005).
4. Derived a force law for the strong/color force called the Einstein strong force that goes through the experimental data for the strong/color force between nucleons and quarks (Sep 1976, 1978, 10th NPA-2003).
5. Derived a force law including the quantum called the Planck quantum force, which is similar to the observed Casimir effect; thus, the Planck constant is introduced directly into force phenomena rather than indirectly through the weak force (Sep 1976, 1978, 10th NPA- 2003).
6. Redefined the four fundamental forces as the Newton gravitational force, Coulomb electromagnetic force, Planck quantum force and Einstein strong force, collectively referred to later as the Heaston equations, which resolves the anomaly that the standard four fundamental forces are not all expressed as force laws (Sep 1976, 1983, 12th NPA-2005).
7. Derived a specific superforce named the Heaston superforce, which has been overlooked in the Einstein field equations of general relativity (Sep 1976, 1983, 10th NPA-2003).
8. Discovered that the Einstein strong force converges on and terminates at the Heaston superforce (Oct 1976, 1983, 10th NPA-2003).
9. Discovered that the Planck quantum force converges on and terminates at the Planck scale at the Heaston superforce, thus providing a theory for the Planck scale (Oct 1976, 1983, 10th NPA-2003).
10. Discovered that the Coulomb electromagnetic force converges on and terminates at a Coulomb scale, similar to the Planck scale, at the Heaston superforce (Oct 1976, 1983, 10th NPA-2003).
11. Derived a new mathematical definition of the concept of force using a generic field theory that was used to derive several different forces in the same manner (Jun 1980, 1983, 12th NPA-2005).
12. Discovered that origami may be used as a tool to advance the understanding of theoretical physics (May 1981, 13th NPA-2006).
13. Observed that almost all of the above discoveries and predictions are interconnected such that the design of the universe is a beautiful, complex and interdependent network of over 100 relationships of physics (May 1981, 15th NPA-2008).
14. Observed that the Heaston equations exhibited characteristics similar to a Lagrangian over the world based upon the standard model (Jan 1982, 2000).*
15. Derived the Yukawa potential (in response to a referee's request) by integrating the Einstein strong force and the observation that the binding force of quarks increase with range (Feb 1983, 1983).*
16. Predicted a maximum atomic orbit, called the Rydberg length, or the maximum Bohr orbit (Jan 1985, 1996, 12th NPA-2005).*
17. Discovered that every frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum exhibits a characteristic Heaston-Planck equation flux level in Joules per second (Sept 1990, 15th NPA-2008).*
18. Derived a discrete structure of the overall electromagnetic spectrum in terms of 19 theoretical Planck-Coulomb bands from gamma rays to micropulsations (Mar 1998, 1999, 12th NPA-2005).
19. Predicted that the electromagnetic spectrum can be extended at both ends to form a universal spectrum that stretches 57 bands from the Planck scale to the horizon of space (Mar 1998, 2000, 12th NPA-2005).
20. Predicted new low frequency micropulsation bands (Mar 1998, 2000, 12th NPA-2005).
21. Predicted that our universe is contained within an asymptotic box defined by at least six asymptotes (Jan 2000, 10th NPA-2003).
22. Predicted that release of the Heaston superforce is a major contributor to the explosive ferocity of nuclear weapons (Jan 2002, 15th NPA-2008).*
23. Discovered mathematical and physical explanations of several number coincidences, such as the Eddington number and the Dirac large number hypothesis (Apr 2002, 13th NPA- 2006).
24. Predicted that the gravitational collapse of matter reaches a finite ratio of size to mass, called the Heaston collapse limit (Roger Rydin named), before all matter transitions to energy (Jul 2003, 11th NPA-2004).
25. Derived the potential well profile from the interactions of the Coulomb electromagnetic force and the Einstein strong force (Aug 2003, 11th NPA-2004).*
26. Discovered independently about the same time as Peter Marquardt of Germany that light and energy have a constant gravitation potential (Jan 2004, 11th NPA-2004).
27. Defined quantum-gravity as the coupling between quantized rotation and relativistic translation (Feb 2005, 12th NPA-2005).*
28. Reconstructed the static phase of the Einstein derivation of the field equations of general relativity by correlating his personal correspondence with his technical publications (Apr 2006, 14th NPA-2007).
29. Predicted an historic asymmetry between objects in uniform motion where the twin paradox, time dilation and Lorentz contraction are general relativity issues rather than special relativity (Apr 2007, 15th NPA-2008).
30. Discovered that the initial equivalence principle assumption made by Einstein in the derivation of the field equations of general relativity requires that matter collapse to energy rather than a singularity (Dec 2007, 15th NPA-2008).
31. Observed that the standard model, string theory, inflation theory, a modified general relativity theory, and my own redefinition of the four fundamental forces all converge on the Planck scale; this convergence indicates that we are near a new understanding of physics (Apr 2008, 15th NPA-2008).*

I GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE FEEDBACK FROM EVERYONE, ESPECIALLY IN THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHY ALLIANCE DURING THE PAST FIVE YEARS. THE FEEDBACK, WHETHER POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE, HELPED MY UNDERSTANDING TO GROW, AND INTRODUCED ME TO SOME VERY TALENTED, PERCEPTIVE AND ARDENT PEOPLE WHO ARE AS PUZZLED AS I AM ABOUT THE CURRENT STATE OF PHYSICS.