I work on the question underneath collaboration: how can independent people — or independent processes — agree on something without a centre that everyone has to trust? My LinkedIn profile calls me a collaborative-systems and distributed-application specialist. The longer story is that I have been chasing that question since I was a kid who liked asking why.

I learned quantum physics and relativity on my father’s knee, built a crystal radio at seven, and argued in school that numbers produced by no algorithm were not real. After high school I studied electrical engineering at Widener, quit in 1968, hitchhiked to California, and came home by bicycle through Wyoming and Nebraska. I went back to school in 1970 to learn AI. At NJIT I landed in computer-mediated communication with Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz. We built EIES — one of the first online conferencing systems — before the internet was a household word.

Murray gave me the mission I have been working on ever since: don’t build one computer as smart as a human; build a system that enables collective intelligence among humans. That mission has taken many forms: Interact and EIES, WikiWorld, FreeTrust, DivvyDAO, the RChain CoLab, RGov, and now QuantumOS. Some of those communities died. I have not given up on the question.

The other half — the physics — became the Quantum Logical Framework, which I began writing in earnest after retiring, when AI made the impossible possible. At the 2002 Science and Ultimate Reality conference, John Archibald Wheeler told me to carry the torch. Both halves of the dream are now running on the same logic.

I was at NJIT from 1974 to 2000 — first as a student, then directing EIES2 and running controlled studies in collective intelligence. I spent the next decades in consulting and security: ProvenSecure.com, travel and banking systems, transportation, and a DARPA-funded project using maximum relative entropy to quantify multifactor risk. That work led to AT&T Shannon Research Labs and a patent on authentication techniques utilizing a computing device. I live in Tampa, Florida, and have five children. Every commit still ends with a quiet “thanks, Dad” — and thanks to God.

ProvenSecure.com is the record of my security and risk work: independent consulting from 1995 to 2010 across travel fulfilment, online banking, transportation and security; a DARPA cybersecurity grant using maximum relative entropy (MRE) to quantify multifactor risk; AT&T Shannon Research Labs (2010–2015); and later, Senior Fellow at Proven Secure Solutions Inc. (2015–2023). The DARPA/MRE work preceded and informed the multifactor risk analysis at AT&T Shannon.

QLF starts from a fact about measurement, not a claim about physics: no measurement has ever produced a real number. Every outcome is a count plus a rational interval. From that starting point it builds a finite, computable substrate in which propositions are phase-string distinctions and truth is decided by measurement — a Zero-Free-Action closure.

The primitive is a half-spin closure: one bit of distinction, log 2, that closes only when its action balances. Spacetime, matter and the constants are then supposed to follow, rather than be assumed.

QLF did not arrive suddenly. It began on my father’s knee — he taught me relativity and quantum physics, wrote to Einstein, and taught me to distrust secondhand claims about Einstein. It continued through a childhood protest that “real numbers” were not real, a senior-year proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus using difference tables, EIES, the Electronic Information Exchange System, Murray Turoff’s collective-intelligence mission, and a long argument about black holes, spin, and local time.

At the 2002 Science and Ultimate Reality conference in Princeton, John Archibald Wheeler told me to “carry the torch.” MyStory.md is the full route: the physics, the communities, the dead ends, and the return. It is the personal record behind the proofs on this page.

QuantumOS is a peer-to-peer layer for people and agents to meet in rooms. Every identity, message, claim and unit of value is a capability token whose validity is an algebraic fact, not a policy someone has to enforce. In practice: zero-trust peer-to-peer with capability tokens standing in for ACLs, sessions and TLS at once.

To an engineer, the claim is narrow and checkable. To anyone else, it is simpler: reaching another person and reaching the truth, the agreement or the value between you are the same verified act.

QuantumOS is running code, not a design document. The guides separate what is implemented from what is planned; the roadmap is the only place a design lives without an implementation behind it. The ZFA kernel is Rust/WASM, transport is WebRTC data channels, and the signalling server is self-hosted.

The room is the unit of cooperation. Open one with someone and the process you share is no longer a metaphor: it is the thing the software is evaluating.

RChain’s bet is that smart contracts should be concurrent processes with formal semantics, not sequential programs on a shared ledger. Rholang is the surface language; the rho-calculus is the model. Authority is held as an unforgeable name rather than an administrator account, which changes what a contract can be trusted to do.

RChain was also the latest stop in a longer search for a better communication language: Interact in EIES, Hoare’s communicating sequential processes, Milner’s pi-calculus, and then Greg Meredith’s rho-calculus. The orchestration systems I had worked with were mathematically wrong. The rho-calculus was the first model that fit both human and quantum communication.

Rho-bot was a Discord interface to an RChain node. It let a community define parameterised rholang snippets as macros, then use them like commands — newBallot, vote, voteresults — without learning rholang first. The point was not to hide the language. It was to let a group test governance contracts and take its own temperature before asking anyone to trust the result.

With Dan Connolly, RGov was a secure, user-programmable group communication prototype with rank-order voting, chat, multisig wallets and trust networking. It was the closest thing to EIES3 before QuantumOS — and when RChain died, the design survived into it.

Much of this was built in the RChain CoLab, a collaborative learning work-study space. The method was simple: pick a real need, build the smallest thing that meets it in public, and let the next person improve it. Rho-bot, the bounty dashboard, the library and the voting app were all products of that method.

RChain taught me the question QLF and QuantumOS now answer at different layers: how do independent processes coordinate without a trusted centre, and how do you know the coordination is correct? The chain was the first place I could test that question with other people, in public, against a real node. RGov carried the group-communication design forward; QuantumOS is where it finally became EIES3.

At NJIT I landed in computer-mediated communication with Murray Turoff and Roxanne Hiltz. We built EIES — the Electronic Information Exchange System — one of the first online conferencing systems, connecting Mailnet, Bitnet, Arpanet and the commercial packet-switched networks before the web.

I developed Interact, an interface language that let groups build their own groupware on top of EIES. Thousands of commands were written largely by the users themselves. Murray gave me the mission I have been working on ever since: “You can spend your whole life building one computer as smart as a human, or you can build a system that enables the collective intelligence among humans.”

The results were largely forgotten; the questions were not. That thread later became WikiWorld, FreeTrust, Dividao and the RChain CoLab. Some of those communities died. I have not given up on the question.

With Joachim Stroh, I presented the Social Ledger at ITP Camp 2019. It is a way to make the intangible parts of social capital — trust, reciprocity, belonging, stewardship — visible and accountable, alongside the financial and human capital a group already tracks.

In 2023 I published an essay on LinkedIn: “Decentralized Cooperation: Merging Marxist Solidarity, Randian Self-Determination, and Lewisian Humanism.” It is an attempt to find a common grammar for three traditions usually set against one another: solidarity, self-determination and humanism. The technical work on this site is one way of taking that essay seriously.

The essay is the political companion to the technical work: it asks what a group would have to believe about itself before it could hold its own record.

Read the essay →

QLF is the formal substrate; QuantumOS is the coordination layer; the Social Ledger and the community work are the human question they serve. QuantumOS is EIES3 — the room Murray Turoff’s mission pointed toward, finished in a way he never got to see. A group that cannot keep a record cannot cooperate. A record that cannot be checked is not a record.

My Story
Quantum Logical Framework · version 0.7 · 18 June 2026

The personal origin story behind QLF: a father’s knee, a crystal radio, EIES, Wheeler’s torch, the communities that died, and the AI-assisted return. It is the long version of the Profile tab.

Read MyStory.md →

Decentralized Cooperation: Merging Marxist Solidarity, Randian Self-Determination, and Lewisian Humanism
LinkedIn · 6 September 2023

An attempt to find a common grammar for solidarity, self-determination and humanism, and to ask what a decentralised organisation would have to look like if all three were true at once.

Read the essay →

For years I answered questions on Quora about relativity, spin, spacetime and the geometry of physics. The answers are informal, but they show the route: take the measurement seriously, and the continuum starts to look like a convenience rather than a foundation.

The repositories are the other half: rho-bot, rchain-tools, rv2020, community-wallet, librho, rhobash, and the QLF and QuantumOS codebases. Each one is an argument you can run.

Browse the repositories →

Good reasons to write: a proof that does not check, a claim in QLF that needs a sharper defeat condition, a room in QuantumOS that behaves badly, a community tool that could be useful, or a question about the older work.

Built as a static site, set in IBM Plex Mono, with no trackers and no build step. The record is the point; the window is just a way to read it.

Last updated November 2026. The source is on GitHub.