Author: Robert J Baran
Bio: Robert Baran, aka Nearly Gold,  is an American Physicist and Professional Engineer. He was born in Meriden, Connecticut but grew up on Long Island, in Queens County, New York. He attended a private elementary school where mathematics and english "were drilled into him." With the exception of nine years in the military he lived and worked in Texas for the better part of 50 years. With his wife, the former international Rotary Secretary Joyce LeBoeuf of Corpus Christi, Texas Baran built his own home in Bristol, Texas with boards and materials from neighboring Ennis, Texas; raised three children: John, Joey and Patty and in all was father to eight through marriages. Baran counts eighteen grandchildren and a great grandchild as of this writing in 2009. Professionally Baran was a registered PE (#42407) in Texas and was also Nationally registered. He is now retired but working on linearizing algorithms (as especially applied to the nuclear radioactive decay process) and, experimentally, on charge separation devices. He is also writing a history of physics as it developed from the 'front row' in the colloquia ran by Max von Laue in Berlin at the German Physical Society where Einstein sat front and center with physicists like Max Planck, James Franck and Paul Wigner. Baran in his earlier working days was chief engineer responsible for the design and implementation of the Emergency Rocket Communications System, termed 494L, which launched the Minuteman force); Minuteman Nuclear Weapons Safety Officer, member staff and chief scientist at Mitre Corporation in charge of nuclear hardening of flight systems; experimentalist who first used the Cockroft Walton deuteron accelerator at MIT to verify theoretical predictions of behavior of semiconductor junctions in the fast neutron environment. He also designed and built the first Q-Switched high power neodymium laser and authored several papers on the interaction of (simulated) hard x-rays and matter. He has been principally an experimentalist but recent interests are more along theoretical lines (random variable analysis, Lagrangian quantum mechanical analogues, ... He has contributed many patents. He was lecturer at the Pentagon on the effects of transient radiation effects and consultant to Sandia, the AF Weapons lab, Bendix, TRW, and others.