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 struc­ture for space­time that, at least so far, seems to neces­si­tate the effects of gen­eral rel­a­tivity and quantum mechanics. The opening chap­ters of that 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 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.)