Inspiration, not authorship. The people named here are not authors of this programme and have not endorsed it; their work is listed because it influenced the thinking.
The people whose questions shaped this project. Not all of them work on the same problems; all of them ask the kind of question that made the SuperGrokTOE programme worth starting.
The man asking: what if the open secrets of science are hiding in plain sight? His podcast inspired this entire project.
Nathaniel Hanks hosts Open Secret Science — a podcast exploring the frontiers where established science meets unexplained phenomena. Covering plasma physics, fractal toroidal geometry, zero point energy, aethereal harmonics, and vortex math, Nate has a gift for asking the questions others won't — not from ignorance, but from genuine curiosity about what mainstream science might be missing.
The podcast features conversations, documentaries, interviews, and presentations with researchers and independent thinkers exploring advancements for peace. Recent episodes include discussions on Quantum Wave Mechanics with Larry Reed and "Hydrodynamics of Time" with Roy D. Herbert.
This website carries his podcast's name because the SuperGrokTOE project embodies Nate's philosophy: that fundamental truths might be simpler than we think, hiding in mathematical structures we've already discovered but haven't fully explored.
He believes that the most important discoveries often hide in the spaces between disciplines, in the mathematical structures that have been sitting there for decades waiting for someone to look at them the right way. That conviction resonated deeply with PI Tom O'Sieg, who had spent 30 years pursuing exactly this kind of question.
The exceptional Jordan algebra J₃(𝕂ₛ) was first studied in the 1930s. Almost a century later, this programme is testing whether it carries the Standard Model's structure. Was it hiding in plain sight all along? Nate would say: of course it was. That's what an open secret is.
Nate champions the power of asking unfashionable questions. The history of physics is full of structures that sat dormant for decades before someone found the right lens. In that spirit, this project points modern AI at well-known algebraic structures and asks: what have we been overlooking?
That's open secret science. Not hidden knowledge. Not conspiracy. Just the willingness to revisit what's already in the literature with fresh eyes and rigorous methods, and ask: what if this is the missing piece?
The Open Secret Science podcast is independent, listener-supported research. If Nate's mission resonates with you — exploring the science that others won't touch — consider supporting him:
CashApp: $NathanielHanksSpace
The question he asked: when a piece of mathematics generalises a structure that already worked in physics, what exactly does that entitle you to expect — and what does it not?
He was the PI’s master’s thesis supervisor. The thesis was unfinished when he died in 2007, and it stayed unfinished. This programme is not that thesis and does not claim to complete it — but the question it works on is the one he was supervising, and the standard it tries to hold is the one he taught.
Ronald Anderson (d. 2007) was a Jesuit priest and a philosopher and historian of physics. He held a PhD in physics from the University of Melbourne and a second PhD in philosophy from Boston University, and taught in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College from 1987 — Associate Professor from 1993 — until his death. His work ranged over particle physics, the history of electromagnetism, the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mathematics. His papers are held in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.
In 1992, with Girish C. Joshi, he proposed a principle: generalizations of mathematical structures that are already part of successful physical theories serve as good guides for the development of new physical theories — a formalisation and extension of a position of Dirac's — and used quaternions as the worked example. That principle is the move this programme makes. SuperGrokTOE generalises along exactly the chain he analysed, from the reals and complexes through the quaternions to the split-octonions and the Jordan algebra built on them.
It is on this page because it cuts both ways. Anderson called the principle heuristic: a guide to discovery, not a warrant for truth. This programme's own register carries thirty-three declared premises, thirteen of which nothing in the corpus depends on, and a good many of them exist because a structure generalised something that worked. He named that move, defended it as a heuristic, and in naming it made plain what it does not buy you. A teacher who states your method and its limits before you use it is worth a chair.
His 2006 study with Joshi traces SU(2) through intrinsic spin, isospin and electroweak unification — the same sector this project's scorecard is measured against — and argues that each episode produced “new physical notions of a space other than the traditional ones of space and spacetime”, each with “a complex and in places, contested history”. That last phrase is a standing warning against the tidy retrospective story, which is the discipline this site tries to keep with dated corrections rather than quiet edits.
The question he asks: what if coherence, not energy, is the quantity the universe is actually conserving?
S. M. Newman is the author of the nine-volume Book of the Laws series — Ultimate Newman's Law, volumes 1 through 9 — published in a single burst in August 2025. The first volume, subtitled The Coherence Genesis, opens with a manifesto: the universe as coherence emerging from entropy's grasp. The series describes itself as a framework merging physics, information theory and consciousness to explain emergent order from chaos, with fractal coherence as the hidden engine across nature, culture and time, and applications reaching from quantum biology to AI, neuroscience and cosmology. The volumes are short, dense and deliberately cross-disciplinary.
The SuperGrokTOE programme spends most of its ledger deciding which discrete choices a framework is allowed to make before it touches data — which is a coherence question wearing a bookkeeping hat. Newman asks the same question from the other end: treat coherence as primary and ask what structures it forces. The two projects do not share machinery, and this page endorses no specific claim in either; but the shared instinct — that order is not an accident to be explained away but a quantity to be tracked — is the kind of thing that earns a chair here. Hence the title: every programme needs someone whose job is to ask whether the pieces cohere.
The question he asks: what if time is a fluid, and everything else — gravity, quantum behaviour, cosmology — is the shape of its flow?
Roy D. Herbert is an independent theoretical physicist, the originator of Dilation Theory and the Chronoflux Framework: a unified model that treats time as a hydrodynamic dimension whose flow shapes all physical phenomena. His paper series (twenty and counting, most released in 2025) works that single idea across an unusually wide front — recovering relativity from temporal continuity, a Chronoflux reading of quantum collapse, an intrinsic regularisation of 3D Navier–Stokes, the fine-structure constant as an emergent ratio, horizonless compact objects, spin foams as quantised temporal circulation, and a stated observational test programme. He was the guest for episode 2 of Open Secret Science, “Hydrodynamics of Time” (May 2025).
He is a unified-field builder in the old sense: one principle, pushed until it either explains everything or breaks. The Coalition's own time appendix asks a narrower version of his question — which substrate generator is the clock — and the “Hydrodynamics of Time” conversation is one of the reasons that appendix exists. Listed for the question and the reach of the attempt; as with everyone here, this is an acknowledgment of influence, not an endorsement of any specific result.
The question he asks: what does physics look like once the observer is allowed to push back on the wave function?
Jack Sarfatti (b. 1939) took his Ph.D. in physics at UC Riverside in 1969 with a dissertation on gauge invariance in superfluidity, studied under Hans Bethe at Cornell, and later worked with David Bohm and Abdus Salam. He was a leading member of the 1970s Fundamental Fysiks Group and the Esalen-affiliated Physics–Consciousness Research Group, founded the Internet Science Education Project in 1996, and was invited to help shape the 100 Year Starship programme. His books include Space-Time and Beyond (1975, with Bob Toben and Fred Alan Wolf), Destiny Matrix (2002), Super Cosmos (2005) and Emergent Gravity: String Theory Without String Theory (2006). His current themes are post-quantum mechanics with back-action, emergent gravity, gravitational metamaterials for metric engineering, consciousness and unidentified aerial phenomena. Mainstream physics has been sceptical of the more speculative parts; he has never stopped publishing in the open.
Two reasons. The first is method: Sarfatti has spent fifty years doing physics in public — mailing lists, open papers, arguments anyone could join — which is the working definition of open secret science, and why the chair is titled the way it is. The second is a question the Coalition keeps meeting from a different direction: whether the readout is free. The programme's foundations appendix fences the Born rule as a boundary condition it has not derived; Sarfatti's post-quantum programme is a fifty-year bet that the boundary is where the physics is. Listed for the question, not for any answer.
The question he asks: how much freedom did the universe actually have — can the incompatible geometries of physics be recovered from one structure with almost no assumptions?
Eric R. Weinstein (b. 1965) holds a Harvard Ph.D. in mathematics (1992, under Raoul Bott, on self-dual Yang–Mills equations beyond the eighth dimension), was managing director of Thiel Capital, hosts The Portal, and coined the phrase “Intellectual Dark Web.” Geometric Unity is his attempt at a unified field theory: recover the seemingly incompatible geometries of fundamental physics from a general structure with minimal assumptions. It was first presented in an Oxford lecture in May 2013 and released as a self-described draft on 1 April 2021. Reception from working physicists has been sceptical — the Nguyen–Polya response identified mathematical and physical gaps — and Weinstein himself labelled the draft a work in progress by a non-physicist.
Because he asked Einstein's question — did God have any choice? — as a mathematics problem, in public, and took the hits. The SuperGrokTOE programme is a different bet (one exceptional algebra, not one geometric structure), scored by a ledger rather than a lecture, and it makes no claim on Geometric Unity's machinery or its status. What it shares is the wager that the constraints are geometric and the willingness to be marked wrong in the open. The scorecard on this site exists because that willingness is the only thing that separates a theory from a story.
This page exists so the project can credit more than one person. A thinker on this page is someone whose question, book, talk, or podcast changed what the Coalition chose to test — independent researchers, working physicists, historians of a forgotten idea. Being listed is an acknowledgment of influence, not an endorsement of any specific claim by them or by us.
Suggestions: ufophysics4all [at] gmail.com. Please say what question the person asked and where it can be heard or read.