Doug's Brief Autobiography

A brief autobiography

Doug Sweetser is a thirty-seven-year-old general-utility nerd. He has read Scientific American from cover-to-cover since the age of eight. He received two S. B. degrees from MIT in 1984, in Biology and Chemical Engineering. His molecular biology work at the Whitehead Institute on the bacterium that causes leprosy was featured on NOVA. He spent time in a Ph. D. program in molecular biology at Boulder Colorado (asked to leave because his advisor thought he was crazy). He spent time in a graduate level program in mathematics in Bloomington, Indiana (asked to pay directly out of empty pockets). He spent time in the psychiatric ward of Boulder Community Hospital (he was still crazy but asked to leave because the room was $450 a night). He has been employed as a home health care aid in Brookline, trading money for time to think. Now he does technical support for the world's oldest ISP (1989), the World, where this information is stored.

For Christmas in 1989, both his mother and sister gave Doug "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. The entire saga of physics as presented by Hawking made sense to Doug, even the parts that were not supposed to make sense. He has pursued his vision of physics ever since. He learned special and general relativity from Prof. Edwin F. Taylor, author of "Spacetime Physics." One year was spent on undergraduate level quantum mechanics, another on graduate level particle physics, a third on electricity and magnetism. His current focus is on a brief definition of spacetime, using something called quaternions.

In order to maintain a creative mind, Doug has learned to draw, sculpts the human form in clay, takes dancing lessons, sings and improvises on the piano. He has designed a recumbent bicycle using ideas from group theory.