Hello. My name is Charles Dermer.
I “attended” the 2025 Trump Inauguration and wrote about it on my Substack page, with the grandiose title Reflections on the Restoration of America balanced by the subtitle The Shittiest Inauguration since the Last One. I’m single issue: #PeopleParty2029.
I was born in 1954 and grew up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, 
a town in the western part of the state. Coincident with my 70th birthday, I ended a 17-month physics journey and completed Physical Demography, the physics of populations and human mortality. See overview here; pdf here.
Beginning in 1972, I studied physics and philosophy at the Claremont Colleges, about 30 miles east of LA. I received a physics BS from Harvey Mudd College in 1977 and an experimental physics MA from Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, in 1979. I transferred to the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, and there I changed fields and studied theoretical astrophysics under Professor Robert J. Gould.
I was awarded a PhD degree from UCSD in 1984. I did postdoctoral work at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, from 1984-1986, and at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab from 1987-1991. I was research scientist at Rice University in Houston, Texas from 1991-1992 before joining the Space Science Division of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC.
From 1992 until I retired, in 2015, I was head of the High Energy Astrophysics Theory Section in the High Energy Space Environment Branch at NRL. My research specialty was high-energy radiation from black holes, neutron stars, and supernovae. See Science.
Recently (2022-2024), I’ve been looking at some problems in statistics, mortality studies and demographic science. This research (May 25, 2023-October 12, 2024) culminated in Physical Demography (2024).
I wrote a short story (May 5, 2023) for our digital age here.
Thought I’d read a good book, so I chose the Bible. (May 2020-March 2022)
I have completed one album of music, Crole River and have two other albums, Xela and Orchids in Sunlight, in production. I also learned some music theory. See Music. (1968-present)