Richard L Ropiequet
Richard L. Ropiequet | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1920 St. Louis, Missouri, United States |
| Died | April 25, 2011 Grass Valley, California, United States |
| Residence | Dallas, OR, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Known for | Particle Physics, Quantum Theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electronics engineering, theoretical physics |
| Institutions | Tektronix |
Richard Lincoln Ropiequet (1920 – April 25, 2011) was an American electronics engineer, inventor and independent theoretical physicist. He was one of the early engineers at Tektronix, where he rose to Chief Engineer and Vice President of Engineering, and later devoted his retirement to developing an independent theory of matter that he called Infinite Particle Physics.
Biography
Ropiequet was born in 1920 in St. Louis, Missouri, and was educated in Illinois. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1946. During the Second World War he served in the United States Navy, receiving electronics technician training in 1944–45 and subsequently teaching successive courses on SG radar as an instructor in 1945–46. He later undertook postgraduate study in psychology at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1949.
Ropiequet died of a stroke on April 25, 2011, in Grass Valley, California, with his family present. In addition to his engineering and scientific pursuits, he was known as a pianist, humorist, poet and gardener.
Career
Ropiequet began his working life in industry, performing routine chemical analysis at the Aluminum Ore Co. in East St. Louis, Illinois (1941–42), and then working as a process engineer on chemical treatments and welding at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (1942–44). From 1946 to 1949 he worked in product development at Firestone Plastics Co. in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, formulating PVC compounds for electronic bonding, electrical-grade PVC and phonograph-record molding resins.
In late 1949 he moved to Oregon to join the fledgling Tektronix, Inc., in Portland and later Beaverton, where he remained until 1963. As an electronics circuit designer he contributed to the development of a wide-range linear time base, dual-trace amplifier, automatic triggering and medical electronics, and advanced to Chief Engineer and Vice President of Engineering and CRT Research. Tektronix's first patent, awarded on June 26, 1956, was issued to Ropiequet for a method of magnifying waveforms on a cathode-ray tube and the circuit therefor. He held numerous patents in both electronics and plastics engineering.
After leaving Tektronix, Ropiequet founded Alta Industries, Inc., operating in Beaverton and Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington (1965–71), where he served as president and product inventor, developing plastics products such as loose-fill packaging, drawer glides and novelties.
Scientific contributions
Ropiequet traced his interest in the structure of particles and nuclei to a high-school chemistry course in 1936, in which the electron-shell numbers 2-8-8-18-18-32 were presented without any geometric rationale. He pursued this question through his three-decade industrial career, following developments in particle and nuclear physics in the scientific literature.
According to his own account, Infinite Particle Physics originated as a flash of insight in 1971 while he was reading the article "Photons as Hadrons" by Frederick V. Murphy and David E. Yount in the July 1971 issue of Scientific American. The article described experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in which high-energy photons striking metal targets occasionally reacted with atomic nuclei to produce pions, leading the authors to suggest that high-energy photons could take on a hadronic character. Ropiequet proposed instead that what was transformed on collision was space itself: that space is composed of the "ingredients" of matter, and that matter is a pattern of distortion, or lattice defect, imposed upon the lattice of space. He spent his retirement from 1971 onward developing this idea, which he later published on his website and in book form.
Books
- 2001 - "Infinite Particle Physics" (Read in full)
- 1999 - "How the Microcosm Works"