Ron Maimon Updated 2025-07-26
Figure 1.
Ron Maimon's Physics Stack Exchange profile picture
. Source.
Ron is mostly known for simultaneously:
Ron seems to share a few philosophies which Ciro greatly agrees with as part of Cirism, which together with his knowledge of physics, make Ciro greatly respect Ron. Such philosophies include:
However he also subscribes to some theories which Ciro Santilli considers conspiracy theories, e.g. his ideas about the Boston Marathon bombing that got him banned from Quora (a ban which Ciro strongly opposes due to freedom of speech concerns!), but the physics might be sound, Ciro Santilli does not know enough physics to judge, but it often feels that what he says makes sense.
chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/7104585#7104585 mentions that he was at Cornell University and did all but dissertation, but he mentions that he was still self-taught:
Eugene Seidel: On your personal info page you write that you are not a physics Ph.D. but does that mean you were a physics undergrad in college then went to grad school and finished ABD... or are you entirely self taught?
Ron Maimon: ABD. I am self- taught though, I only went to school for accreditation. I had a thesis worth of work at the time I left grad-school,
Eugene Seidel: ok thanks
Ron Maimon: I was just kind of sickened by academic stuff that was going on--- large extra dimensions were popular then.
Eric Walker: Anyway, thanks Ron -- I'll get back to you with more questions soon, I'm sure.
Ron Maimon: Also I was at Cornell, my advisor left for Cincinnatti, and I was not in very good standing there (I was kind of a jerk, as I still am). Some friends wanted to start a biotech company called "Gene Network Sciences", and I joined them.
This is corroborated e.g. at: web.archive.org/web/20201226171231/http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~gtoombes/Student_Index.html (original pages.physics.cornell.edu/~gtoombes/Student_Index.html down as of 2023).
Bibliography:
  • www.reddit.com/r/DecodingTheGurus/comments/17cb0n8/do_you_remember_ron_maimon_from_the_prepodcast/ "Do you remember Ron Maimon from the pre-podcast era? Where would he rank on the Guru scale?" user JohnFatherJohn comments:
    I was actually friends with Ron Maimon at Cornell around 2006-2008. He was doing some research for my undergraduate research advisor and was a regular at a few of the same coffee shops I frequented. He was a legitimate brilliant physicist who had some strange personality quirks and blindspots, but his simultaneous breadth and depth of physics knowledge was staggering. He detested academia and couldn't stay focused on any one given problem for too long before moving on to something else though.
  • gmachine1729.livejournal.com/161418.html Ron Maimon answers about physics and math on Quora (part 1) by Sheng Li (2020) contains a selection of some amazing Ron Maimon posts
  • www.reddit.com/r/RonMaimon/ someone made a Reddit for him. Less than 100 users as of 2022, but has potential.
  • some Quora threads about him, oh the irony:
    • www.quora.com/Is-Ron-Maimon-actually-a-pioneer-or-a-jest
    • www.quora.com/Are-Ron-Maimons-answers-on-mathematics-physics-and-computer-science-factually-correct
    • www.quora.com/What-do-people-think-of-Ron-Maimons-paper-Computational-Theory-of-Biological-Function-I
    • www.quora.com/Who-is-Ron-Maimon/answer/Ron-Maimon
      I'm a physics grad school drop-out working in theoretical biology but I still do physics when I get a chance, but not right now because I am in a middle of a project to understand the properties of a certain virus as completely as possible.
      Also in a comment he explains something to a now deleted comment, presumably asking why he dropped out of grad school, and gives a lot more insight:
      It's a complicated boring story.
      I dropped out mainly to do biology with friends at a startup, because I figured out how you're supposed to do theory in biology, but also I truly believe it was next to impossible for me to get a degree without selling out, and I would rather be shot than write a paper with an idea I don't believe.
      My grad school phase was a disaster. I first worked for Eric Siggia, but I got away because he had me do something boring and safe, I figured I have only a limited number of years before I turn 30 and my brain rots, and I wasn't going to sell out and do second-rate stuff. I found a young guy at the department doing interesting things (Siggia was also doing interesting things, like RNA interactions, he just wouldn't assign any of them to ME), this was Philip Argyres, and got him to take me. Argyres wanted me to work on large-extra dimensions (this was 1998), but I made it clear to him that I would rather be boiled in oil. I worked a little bit on a crappy experimental setup that didn't work at all, because I didn't know enough about electromagnetic screening nor about how to set up experiment. But EVERYONE LOVED IT! This is also how I knew it was shit. Good work is when everyone hates it. But I learned Lifschitz's ideas for quantum electrodynamics in media from this project.
      Me and every competent young person in high-energy physics knew large extra dimensions was a fraud on the day it came out, and I had no intention of doing anything except killing the theory. Once Wikipedia appeared, I did my best to kill it by exposing it's charlatanry on the page for large extra dimension. That was in 2005 (after getting fired from the company), and from this point onward large-extra-dimensions lost steam. But I can't tell how much of this was my doing.
      Argyres liked N=2 theory, and we did something minor in N=2 SUSY models around 2000, but I was bogged down here, because I was trying to do Nicolai map for these, and it ALMOST worked for years, but it never quite worked. But I knew from the moduli interpretation and Seiberg-Witten solution that it must work. If I live long enough, I'll figure it out, I am still sure it isn't hard. But this was the link to statistical stochastic models, the work I was doing with Jennifer Schwarz, and I wanted to link up the two bodies of work (they naturally do through Nicolai map).
      But I had my own discovery, the first real discovery I made, in 1999, this thing that I called the mass-charge inequality, what Vafa and Motl called "the weakest-force principle" when they discovered it in 2006. It was swampland, and Vafa hadn't yet begun swampland. My advisor didn't believe my result was correct, because he saw me say many stupid things before this. So he wouldn't write it or develop it with me (but I had read about Veltman telling 'tHooft he couldn't publish the beta-function, I knew Argyres was wrong about this)
      Anyway, Argyres left for Cincinnatti in 2000, and I joined the company then. I was in the company until january 2005. Then they fired me, which was ok, by then it was a miserable hell-hole full of business types.
      I discovered Wikipedia, and started killing large extra dimensions. I wanted to finish my thesis, and some people agreed to help me do this, but I had told myself "no thesis until you get the Nicolai map sorted out" and I never did. I worked with Chris Henley a little bit, who wanted me to do some stuff for him, and I discovered an interesting model for high-Tc, but Henley said it was out of fasion, and nobody would care, even though I knew it was the key to the phenomenon (still unpublished, but soon).
      This was 2008-2009, and I became obsessed with cold fusion, so Henley dropped me, as I had clearly gone crazy. I developed the theory of cold fusion during the last weeks of working for Henley. Then I dropped out for good.
      Honestly, by the time I was gone, I realized that the internet would make a degree counterproductive, because I knew I had better internet writing skills than any of the old people, I was a Usenet person. Online, the degrees and accreditation were actually a hinderance. So by this point, I secretly preferred not to have a PhD, because I knew I was good at physics, and I could attack from the outside and win. It's not too hard if you know the technical material.
      The only problem is that I was unemployed and isolated in Ithaca for about 7 years after having gone through my first productive phase. But I developed the cold-fusion ideas in this period, I learned a lot of mathematics, and I developed a ton of biology ideas that are mostly unpublished, but will be published soon. It astonished people that I could have no degree and be unemployed and have such a sky-high ego. The reason is that I could evaluate my own stuff, and I liked it!
Backlinks:
Video 1.
Ron Maimon interview with Jeff Meverson (2014)
Source. Ripped from Jeff's "Quoracast": player.fm/series/quoracast-podcast/ron-maimon-truther Ron mentions he was an early-Usenet user. Key points:
Rooting for sport teams is stupid Updated 2025-07-16
Since Ciro Santilli is Brazilian, this is understandably a common conversation opener.
And rightly so, since soccer in particular is truly ridiculously popular in Brazil, where "what is your local soccer team?" is just as valid a conversation starter as "Which city are you from?".
So here goes Ciro's 2020 cynic answer:
I currently root actively against Brazil.
The ironic reason is simple: maybe is Brazil loses more on this useless art, then maybe people will get tired of it, and instead invest on more useful and beautiful arts.
Notably, what Ciro really wants people to root for are:
Don't get Ciro wrong.
Observing professionals who do it amazingly can be beautiful.
But why the F do you have to root for a team unless your wife or children are playing in it (and even then..., how will that help?)?
What will you get from that?
Even if it is your national team, why does it matter if they win or lose?
Hooliganism just takes that uselessness to a hole new level.
Now some confessions.
A five year old Ciro will never forget when the feeling of Brazil won the 1994 World Cup on the penalties and everyone went mad that evening.
A nine year old Ciro stopped watching the 1998 World Cup Final of Brazil vs France half way during the 3-0 massacre and went to his front garden to kick his soccer ball on the metallic fence gate which represented a goal.
After that, Ciro went through puberty he guesses, and noticed that the natural sciences are just cooler than this soccer watching bullshit.
Video 1.
Football, Football, Football by Mitchell and Webb
. Source.
Video 3.
Rooting for sports is for suckers by Lit Nomad
. Source.
Ruby on Rails Updated 2025-07-16
The only reason why Ruby exists.
This web framework is pretty good as of 2020 compared to others, because it managed to gain a critical community size, and there's a lot of basic setup already done for you.
it is just big shame it wasn't written in Python or even better, Node.js, because learning Ruby is completely useless for anything else. As of 2020 for example, most Node.js web frameworks feel like crap compared to Rails, you just have to debug so much there.
Used in GitLab, which is why Ciro Santilli touched it.
Saint Seiya Updated 2025-07-16
This was THE craze thing in Brazil before Pokemon, it was shown from 1994 to 1997. In particular the collectible action figures! It was possibly more popular in Brazil than e.g. in the US: www.quora.com/Why-was-Saint-Seiya-so-popular-in-Brazil
The thing as quite violent, rated for 14-year olds, but no one gave a fuck, 7 yo Ciro was happily watching it. We protect children too much.
That series also had quite a religious feel to it (as obviously suggested by the series English name itself). It must also have been a great motivator to getting young kids into astronomy!
Ciro's favorite character was definitely Andromeda Shun. He was smart and thoughtful, and had the coolest most complex weapon: his chain whips. He's also a bit effeminate, with his pink clothing and a gentle way. Perhaps that is the reason for adult Ciro's mild fascination with the Andromeda Galaxy.
The English name is horrendous... the Portuguese/French name is so much better: Knights of the Zodiac! Saying this in English just reminded Ciro Santilli of the Zodiac Killer. But nevermind.
Sandy Maguire Updated 2025-07-16
Lots of similar ideologies to Ciro Santilli, love it:
Other interesting points:
He's a Haskell person.
Santos, São Paulo, Brazil Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli lived in Santos from about the year 1998 to 2007, with a 10 month hiatus in Coventry, UK, until he went to the University of São Paulo.
Santos is the nearest beach city to São Paulo City, and for this reason:
Ciro idolizes Santos as the perfect location to live nature-wise due to its amazing wide sandy beach, in which Ciro spent endless hours walking on the sand and on the largest beachfront garden in the world (archive), meditating, and playing some soccer after school was over. Santos is also the city where Pelé first played professionally.
Ciro has visited Santos several times after leaving Brazil. Doing this gives him a weird feeling of having a separate life, in which time passes 2 weeks every few years. Of course, as your family grows, it gets harder and harder to go back home, and your family members might want to just go travel to more interesting places than just stay at your wonderful beach which you love in part due to nostalgia.
Ciro is also fond of the concept of the small public buildings near the beach garden (postos de praia), which serve different cultural activities: library, comic book store, art cinema, surf school. It is such a shame that the library and comic book ones are in such bad shape as of 2020, old books and poor people who go there to sleep a bit in the barely working air conditioning. Ciro fantasizes how those could instead be cultural hubs for the gathering of the brightest artists, and scientists, of town. Maybe they are just too small. Maybe it is not within the realm of possibility of public service. Maybe, we should focus instead in the poorer regions, far form the beach. But the dream remains.
Santos only has one natural defect: mosquitoes. By the sea it is fine because the wind is strong, and they don't like salt water. But anywhere else, you will be eaten alive, and maybe get dengue, Ciro got it once. Gene drive, please.
This instagram page has several drone videos of the region: www.instagram.com/malta.drone
Figure 1.
Panoramic view of Santos' beach line by Diego Torres Silvestre (2009)
Source.
Figure 2.
Canal 5 on the beach by VicTrindade (2017)
Source. This is one of Santos 7 old canals, which are still in use and serve to reduce floodings in the city, which are caused by the strong tropical rains that fall on the city. This is particularly important to keep the mosquito population under some control. All canals were built in the first third of the 20th century, except canal 7 which is from 1968[ref]. The canals have normally very shallow water when it is not raining, and since it is rain water they are basically clean. There are other canals which are/were used for sewage, but then are not open air. The canals now serve as handy reference points and practical avenues in town, as well as being surrounded with nice trees that provide shade and drop small inedible purple fruit that will stain your car for all eternity. They do scar the beach line a bit it must be said, but it's part of the charm of the city, and they serve as good reference points for runners.
São Paulo City Updated 2025-07-16
Although Ciro Santilli lived in São Paulo City nominally during his studies, it would be more precise to say that he lived in University of São Paulo-land, because Ciro was cheap, didn't have a car, and did nothing but study, stay at home, go back to Santos to see his parents and the beach.
But the little he saw of the city made a deep impression on him.
The unreasonable size.
The unbearable contrasts.
Caetano's Sampa is the ultimate description of the city!
São Remo, the favela next to USP Updated 2025-07-16
While in Brazil, Ciro Santilli used to walk through the outskirts of a small favela to get to university every day, the Favela de São Remo.
To the left, the outer walls of a large police station, with concertina wire on top and all.
To the right, dudes selling drugs on the entry of a small corridor street, presumably to which they could easily escape to in case of need.
The cops could have identified the dealers with binoculars if they actually wanted to!!!
The drug sellers did keep the peace in their business area, and Ciro never got robbed, and would come back from university parties on foot late through the favela.
But Ciro's friends did say that things got much worse after Ciro left, for example a flash kidnapping was reported in 2015.
Wikipedia says that this favela started in the 60s and 70s as settlements of the builders of the University, and that many of the people there still work for the University.
This is consistent with the terribly old buildings Ciro saw when he was at university. They even had the building skills to build their own homes.
The state just has to either legalize those people, or give them houses somewhere else nearby. A world class University is the most important thing a poor country can have, and its image cannot be jeopardized like that.
The existence of that favela, right next to one of the most important universities in Latin America, puts Brazil's surreal social inequality into perspective. Especially considering that before extremely heavy university entry quotas were added, basically all students of the university (or at least of the courses that lead to high paying jobs) had attended private schools, and therefore were not of the poorer classes (see passage about 10 out 500 passage from Section "Free gifted education").
The janitors of the apartment block Ciro lived all lived in the favela. Yes, in poor countries lives are worth nothing, and some poorer people work by watching the entrance of buildings of less poor people 24/7 to guard it from other even more desperate poor people who might want to rob the not so poor inhabitants. They also do janitor jobs like cleaning common areas in parallel.
They were incredibly nice hard-working people, and Ciro spoke often with them. If only given the opportunity, those people could be amazing engineers or scientists obviously. Ciro was also glad to be their friends, and sat down with them quite a few times for several minutes after coming back from University parties, partly because he felt bad about them having to work at that time, but also partly because he just liked them. And they were always up to date on who had come back with a girl to the apartment or not. Ciro imagines that if it had been him, it would have been a perfect bragging opportunity ;)
They had "nothing" but were still happy. This is true wisdom, and a good reminder that all our non-transhumanist technical goals are nothing.
We must destroy social inequality.
Saylor Academy Updated 2025-07-16
This is an interesting initiative which has some similarities to Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook project.
The fatal flaw of the initiative in Ciro Santilli's opinion is the lack of user-generated content. We will never get there without UGC and algorithms, never.
Also as of 2021, it mostly useless business courses: learn.saylor.org unfortunately.
But it has several redeeming factors which Ciro Santilli aproves of:
The founder Michael J. Saylor looks a bit crooked, Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked comes to mind. But maybe he's just weird.
Video 1.
Michael Saylor interview by Lex Fridman (2022)
Source.
At the timestamp:
When I go, all my assets will flow into a foundation, and the foundation's mission is to make education free for everybody forever.
What statement... maybe he's actually not crooked, maybe it was just an accounting mistake... God, why.
If only Ciro Santilli knew how to contact him and convince him that his current approach is innefective and that Ciro has something better! Michael, please Google into this page some day, Ciro Santilli needs funding for OurBigBook.com. A hopeless Tweet at: twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1548350114623660035. Also tried to hit his saylor@strategy.com.
School must offer free accommodation for students Created 2024-11-15 Updated 2025-07-16
More precisely, for students whose parents don't live near the school. Or alternatively, online-only courses that offer the same diploma as the presencial version. Or a compromise where the best N% students get accommodation, where N is a parameter of how decent your society is overall.
Since all the learning resources will be available online on OurBigBook.com, or through online 1-to-1 chats with mentors, it might be cheaper for students to work either from their parent's homes if their home has reasonable work conditions: a silent room with reasonable Internet access and no drug addicts in the house.
Alternatively, a public local library with free WiFi would do as well. But there would need to be a strict silence policy enforced, unlike most public libraries we see today. Ciro once saw a bird shaped noise detector that would sing if the noise went above a certain threshold, that was a good idea. Just like linting, it is easier to let machines decide deterministically on subjective questions to reduce useless arguments over who is right. Ciro has even seen libraries where the local council uses the same library open space as a citizen counsel area. What's the fucking point... these people have never done any deep work in their lives.
Then the state only needs to pay transportation and temporary accommodation to attend concentrated month-long laboratory workshop courses and week-long conferences, since the only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories. In cases where the home conditions are not good enough, the state can either pay for on-demand WeWork-like offices near the student's home, of for a full on-campus accommodation as in a boarding school. What is indispensable is that all students who pass the entry criteria must have such working conditions. Students who stay home can also earn a scholarship to help pay for their rent, food and Internet access.
Anything else is just incredibly unfair to the poor. Ciro Santilli has already witnessed two cases, in developed, and under-developed countries, where very high potential poorer students were forced to work to support themselves in parallel to a demanding degree because their parents couldn't pay their rent on a different city, and the students mental health issues due to this. In one of those cases the student had to abandon the course altogether.
It doesn't help that school has become a pure student-evaluation system, which basically implies putting studets through a lot of useless pressure.
One of the stories that Ciro Santilli's father tells is about how when they were dating, one of Ciro Santilli's mother's greatest wish for her hypotetical child would be that "they should not need to work during their studies as she had". As destiny would have it, Ciro Santilli's family had good conditions and Ciro never thought even once about money. And even then, school still sucked. Imagine without that basic, mandatory, stability!
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
Scott Hassan Updated 2025-07-16
The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?
In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.
As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].
Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife
In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.
In 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.
In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.
Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom
To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.
The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first edit war, how exciting:
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:
  • 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known fact
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
so it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.
Figure 2.
Scott Hassan and Allison Huynh posing with a green screen in 2001
. Source. Oh, to be young and feel love's keen sting.
Figure 3.
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source.
Second brain Updated 2025-07-16
In the 2020's, this refers to writing down everything you know, usually in some graph structured way.
This is somewhat the centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers: dumping your brain into text form, which he has been doing through Ciro Santilli's website.
This is also the closest one can get to immortality pre full blown transhumanism.
Ciro's still looking for the restore this plaintext backup on a new body though.
It is a good question, how much of your knowledge you would be able to give to others with text and images. It is likely almost all of it, except for coordination/signal processing tasks.
His passion for braindumping like this is a big motivation behind Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook.com work.