Dr. Gavin Bascom received his PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, where he used quantum and Newtonian mechanics to model nucleic acids by computer simulation. He has since gone on to continue refining his skills in the arena of DNA simulation and statistical mechanics as a researcher at New York University. He has been an avid fan of the Big Bang and quantum mechanics since his teenage years, and many of the ideas presented in this book have been in development since then, honed and refined by his time working with simulation and quantum mechanics.