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Thad  Roberts

Thad Roberts

Inspiration for NYT Bestseller Sex on the Moon

Thad Roberts

Inspiration for NYT Bestseller Sex on the Moon

Biography

Thad Roberts is the inspi­ra­tion behind the New York Times bestseller 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.

Roberts 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, skin­-dived off the shores of Hawaii, mined for rare gemstones, expe­ri­enced zero gravity and extreme iso­la­tion, and explored the remains of a sunken ship.

When he was 22, Roberts 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-astrophysicist, 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 Roberts fell in love with a bril­liant and beau­tiful biology intern at NASA. Wanting to give her­ the moon (lit­er­ally), Roberts 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, Roberts sold some of those pieces and landed in the middle of a government sting.

Roberts was sen­tenced to 100 months in fed­eral prison for his actions. Though he would never repeat those acts, Roberts 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, Roberts 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.

Roberts left prison with some­thing more valu­able to him then a safe full of moon rocks—a manuscript over 700 pages long that lucidly images a fractal structure to the geometry of space-time, unveiling an axiomatic structure that might be responsible for the unexplained mysteries of modern physics. Roberts’s research is centered around the possibility that quantum mechanics is emergent—that instead of being exact, quantum mechanics is a very accurate approximation to a deeper-level deterministic theory.

Thad Roberts 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. Roberts encour­ages audiences 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.

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Eleven Dimensions Theory

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Sex on the Moon

Thad Roberts provides an intimate look into his life as a Mormon turned adventure seeker and aspiring astronaut who stole moon rocks from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and spent time in federal prison—all to impress a girl. As the subject of the book Sex on the Moon, Roberts takes audiences on a thrilling yet emotional journey full of heartbreak and hope, inspiring audiences to chase their dreams and change their lives.

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