Greetings! I am the founder and president of the TANC Lab. My interest in science dates back to elementary school when I would spend recess in the library, vociferously reading all the books on space travel. Carl Sagan’s TV series and book “Cosmos” inspired me to choose science as a career while in middle school.
I realized I’d need to study hard to achieve this dream; therefore, I slowly improved my math and science ability from below average in middle school, to being one of the top students by the time I entered U.C. Davis as a physics major. It was at U.C. Davis that I was introduced to the possibility of retrocausality. We were taught that no laws of physics prohibited backwards-in-time communication but that there was no experimental evidence for it (which I later found out that this is not strictly true because of precognition research!). Upon graduation from U.C. Davis, I continued studying physics as a graduate student at Yale University, receiving my Ph.D. in 2009.
I’ve always had a broad interest in science, paying attention to cutting-edge research across multiple fields. At Yale, I became interested in the mystery of consciousness and the various debates regarding how subjective experience can arise from brain activity, but no explanation seemed satisfactory to me. It still seems impossible to figure out how to explain subjective experience in terms of current science. I was also interested in neuroscience research which seems to show that conscious awareness of intention lags behind the decision processes that lead to behavior (e.g., the work of Benjamin Libet). The presentiment research we’re working on now will certainly have important implications regarding our notion of “free will”. By developing solid paradigms to study precognition we will be able to make headway on what have seemed largely intractable problems in the philosophy of science.
Meanwhile, I spent most of my time at Yale enduring hard classes like Quantum Field Theory and then doing my dissertation research on high-energy nuclear physics. I worked in the STAR at RHIC collaboration (the acronym stands for “Solenoidal Tracker At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider). The RHIC collider would smash gold ions, copper ions, deuterons, or protons together at near the speed of light in order to study the nuclear forces which bind quarks and gluons within nucleons and nucleons within nuclei.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider:
My dissertation research focused on the production of charm quarks in copper on copper collisions. A picture of the STAR detector readout is below:
As it turned out, Professor John Cramer, the developer of the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, was also a member of the STAR collaboration. A key aspect of Transactional Interpretation is that quantum interactions are explained in terms of advanced (backwards-in-time) and retarded (forwards-in-time) waves. I also learned about Prof. Cramer’s work investigating retrocausal communication using quantum optics. He believed it might be possible to communicate backwards in time based on standard quantum mechanics. However, he has found a flaw in his calculations invalidating his current experimental design.
After graduating from Yale, I continued my work in high-energy nuclear physics at the RIKEN Radiation Laboratory in Wako, Japan (just outside Tokyo). I worked in the PHENIX experiment (Pioneering High-Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment) on a RIKEN postdoctoral fellowship for three years. I was in Japan during the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. My supervisor went to Fukushima prefecture to do radiation monitoring while I continued data analysis in Wako.
At RIKEN I continued being interested in retrocausality, stumblingly upon Prof. Dick Bierman’s work in unconscious precognition. Reading other papers in the field, the results appeared to be solid and good evidence of retrocausality. This research is important to our understanding of physics, neuroscience, and psychology so precognition research should be prioritized to understand the underlying causes behind this phenomenon.
After my RIKEN fellowship expired, I initially desired to continue an academic career. However, the so-called “two-body problem” would make it extremely risky and difficult to start a family while following a traditional academic career. So instead of being depressed that so few scientists were investigating presentiment and retrocausality, I decided to try it myself! I ran my own informal project copying an experimental design from Dean Radin, but it became apparent that I would need more resources and colleagues in order to do professional-quality work; therefore, I founded the TANC lab. I plan for our lab to undertake pioneering high-quality research into the nature of time and consciousness. Be sure to sign up for our email list and we will keep you posted on all our exciting new discoveries!
