Theoretical General Relativity

My primary studies have been in the area of Theoretical General Relativity. In particular, my dissertation was concerned with the complete solutions of Einstein's equations in spaces known as HyperHeavens. The exigencies of work and the lack of available positions in academia for this field has led me to treat this topic as a hobby more than as a career. Now that I am slowly moving past the need for mundane work, I am finding time to revisit these problems, attempting to incorporate the Cosmological Constant and some manner of Electromagnetic fields into these solutions. With the renewed interest in the Cosmological Constant, there may be some merit to pursing this. The main contribution my work could make is to indicate the types of symmetries that would be possible or likely in the presence of a non-zero Cosmological Constant. Although solutions in HyperHeaven are divorced somewhat from reality, being that they are in a complex space and not in our normal real space, still, information gleaned here about symmetries can be carried back to Earth, so to speak.

Here is an example of one of the little equations I work with from time to time:

There, in a nutshell, is my current work. Pretty simple, eh? In any case, it gets a bit more complicated when you actually write it out, but there you see an example of another kind of beauty I find in this world, along with that provided by nature. I have an innate love of order and symmetry, which is probably why mathematics appeals so strongly to me. The above equations are called Killing's equations and express the symmetry inherent in Einstein's equations.

Astrophysics

I have done some collaborative work in the area of Galaxy Clusters, in particular, work in Radio Astronomy concerning the Virgo cluster. Although this work never got published due to time constraints and the group being scattered about the world, I had a great deal of fun working with the data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico while I was an Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of New Mexico.

Molecular Physics

As a graduate student and much later as a colleague, I worked a bit in the area of molecular physics, puzzling out the inner workings of diatomic molecules using some fun tools, like one of the early Cray super-computers. I can't say the work was exciting, but it was precise and had its own internal beauty. The last work I did was actually related to attempting to understand the origin of some mysterious absorption bands in interstellar molecular clouds. We had guessed that perhaps, if the clouds were near young stars, the absorption could be accounted for by hydrogen molecular ion transitions. Unfortunately, the model we chose proved to not provide a clear answer.  That is the way it is in science, though. Sometimes you get null results, which, at least, eliminate that possibility from further consideration.