About Thad

Thad being mys­te­rious in the desert.

Thad Roberts is the inspi­ra­tion behind the New York Times best seller Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History, which is being adapted into a fea­ture film by Sony Pictures.

Thad enjoys exploring unfa­miliar realms and seeking out new expe­ri­ences in an attempt to absorb new per­spec­tives and to expand his own hori­zons. He has been dropped down a mine shaft in Peru, dis­cov­ered a Tyrannosaurid tooth in the Utah deserts, skin­dived off the shores of Hawaii, mined for rare gem stones, expe­ri­enced zero gravity, extreme iso­la­tion, and explored the remains of a sunken ship.

When he was 22, Thad was hired on as a co-op at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He started out as an Astrophysicist, moved to Geo-astrophysicst, and then even­tu­ally became a Flight Lead in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory where he SCUBA dived with the astro­nauts, helped train them for their EVAs (space walks), and par­tic­i­pated in under­water studies of the International Space Station mock-ups.

At age 25 Thad fell in love with a bril­liant and beau­tiful Biology intern at NASA. Wanting to give her­ the moon (lit­er­ally), Thad mas­ter­minded the infa­mous moon rock caper and made off with con­t­a­m­i­nated lunar sam­ples. 33 years to the day after Neil Armstrong first picked up a piece of the moon, Thad sold some of those pieces and landed in the middle of a government sting.

Thad was sen­tenced to 100 months in fed­eral prison for his actions. Though he would never repeat those acts, Thad doesn’t regret how things turned out. Despite the iso­la­tion, lone­li­ness, and hard lessons that defined those years, he notes that without that time of intense ded­i­ca­tion and con­stant focus he may have never dived so deeply into ques­tions about the con­struc­tion of our Universe. After coming face to face with his own inse­cu­ri­ties, Thad decided to over­come the odds of his past mis­takes and to once again strive for his dreams. His days in prison were spent teaching, exer­cising, wrestling with the mys­teries that plague modern physics, and exploring new axiomatic assump­tions that might account for them.

Examining the struc­ture of space­time. (by Passhaa)

Thad left prison with some­thing more valu­able to him then a safe full of moon rocks – a man­u­script over 700 pages long that lucidly describes how he was led to a new geo­metric axioms for the struc­ture of space­time. The result was quantum space theory (qst), a spe­cific form of super­fluid vacuum theory (SVT), which now stands as a can­di­date for the theory of quantum gravity. The opening chap­ters of Thad’s book ‘Einstein’s Intuition: Visualizing Nature in Eleven Dimensions’ can be found here: (Preface, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4,). A pdf of the entire pre-print book can be acquired upon request.

Thad is now living a life full of love, adven­ture, and friend­ship, and he is still shooting for the stars. He works to con­tribute to Einstein’s dream of uni­fying the realms of rel­a­tivity and quantum mechanics into one intu­itively acces­sible map of Nature, and he is taking steps to one day fly to space. Thad encour­ages everyone to chase their dreams, to expe­ri­ence the world for them­selves, and to sup­port others in their dreams. He believes that a first step in com­mit­ting to your dreams is making a list of things done and things to do. With each other’s sup­port he believes that we can all rebound from our mis­takes and reach for the stars.

Click here for more on Thad’s phi­los­ophy on life.

For more on Thad’s love story/infamous caper watch the  inter­view with Ben Mezrich below.

Or:

To be intro­duced to quantum space theory TEDx-style, watch Thad’s pre­sen­ta­tion at TEDxBoulder 2010.

Contact us here if you are inter­ested in joining the effort to explore the poten­tial that Nature’s has a higher-dimensional structure.

(More photos can be found in the gal­leries sec­tion.)

Thad is cur­rently under­taking a 7.5 month journey to enhance his con­nec­tion to Nature, learn Spanish, and fur­ther his anthro­po­log­ical studies. Along with Angela and Chihiro, he will be trav­eling from Utah to Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. The crew will then work as deck hands on small ships to sail to Columbia, Venezuela, and Trinidad and Tobago, and then begin island hop­ping to Grenada, Barbados, St. Lucia, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. The crew will then fly to Peru for three weeks to par­tic­i­pate in an Incan Anthropology Dig. Where they will go from there is entirely up in the air.

Throughout this journey Thad will con­tinue to inves­ti­gate the con­se­quences of the assump­tion that the vacuum is a super­fluid. He has learned that expo­sure to new ideas, new cul­tures, and new places tends to amplify the dis­covery process and enhance sci­en­tific creativity.