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Christian Ferkos PhDThesisDefense

Monday July 26, 2021 at 11 am CDT

SUPERSYMMETRY AND IRRELEVANT DEFORMATIONS

This The T bar{T} operator provides a universal irrelevant deformation of two-dimensional quantum field theories with remarkable properties, including connections to both string theory and holography beyond AdS spacetimes. In particular, it appears that a T bar{T}- deformed theory is a kind of new structure, which is neither a local quantum field theory nor a full-fledged string theory, but which is nonetheless under some analytic control. On the other hand, supersymmetry is a beautiful extension of Poincare symmetry which relates bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom. The extra computational power provided by supersymmetry renders many calculations more tractable. It is natural to ask what one can learn about irrelevant deformations in supersymmetric quantum field theories.

In this talk, I will describe a presentation of the T bar{T} deformation in manifestly supersymmetric settings. I define a ``supercurrent-squared'' operator, which is closely related to T bar{T}, in any two-dimensional theory with (0, 1), (1, 1), or (2, 2) supersymmetry. This deformation generates a flow equation for the superspace Lagrangian of the theory, which therefore makes the supersymmetry manifest. In certain examples, the deformed theories produced by supercurrent-squared are related to superstring and brane actions, and some of these theories possess extra non-linearly realized supersymmetries. Finally, I will show that Tbar{T} defines a new theory of both abelian and non-abelian gauge fields coupled to charged matter, which includes models compatible with maximal supersymmetry. In analogy with the

Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) theory, which defines a non-linear extension of Maxwell electrodynamics, these models possess a critical value for the electric field.

Committee members:

Savdeep Sethi (Chair)

Jeffrey Harvey

Robert Wald

Mark Oreglia

Christian will be starting a postdoc at UC Davis in the Center for Quantum Mathematics and

Physics (QMAP).

Thesis Defense

Read more here:

Christian Ferko's PhD Thesis Defense | Department of Physics | The University of Chicago - UChicago News

Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the modern age. Best known for his appearances in popular media and his lifelong battle against debilitating illness, his true impact on posterity comes from his brilliant five-decade career in science. Beginning with his doctoral thesis in 1966, his groundbreaking work continued nonstop right up to his final paper in 2018, completed just days before his death at the age of 76.

Hawking worked at the intellectual cutting edge of physics, and his theories often seemed bizarrely far-out at the time he formulated them. Yet they're slowly being accepted into the scientific mainstream, with new supporting evidence coming in all the time. From his mind-blowing views of black holes to his explanation for the universes humble beginnings, here are some of his theories that were vindicated and some that are still up in the air.

Hawking got off to a flying start with his doctoral thesis, written at a critical time when there was heated debate between two rival cosmological theories: the Big Bang and the Steady State. Both theories accepted that the universe is expanding, but in the first it expands from an ultra-compact, super-dense state at a finite time in the past, while the second assumes the universe has been expanding forever, with new matter constantly being created to maintain a constant density. In his thesis, Hawking showed that the Steady State theory is mathematically self-contradictory. He argued instead that the universe began as an infinitely small, infinitely dense point called a singularity. Today, Hawking's description is almost universally accepted among scientists.

More than anything else, Hawking's name is associated with black holes another kind of singularity, formed when a star undergoes complete collapse under its own gravity. These mathematical curiosities arose from Einstein's theory of general relativity, and they had been debated for decades when Hawking turned his attention to them in the early 1970s.

According to an article in Nature, his stroke of genius was to combine Einstein's equations with those of quantum mechanics, turning what had previously been a theoretical abstraction into something that looked like it might actually exist in the universe. The final proof that Hawking was correct came in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope obtained a direct image of the supermassive black hole lurking in the center of giant galaxy Messier 87.

Black holes got their name because their gravity is so strong that photons, or particles of light, shouldn't be able to escape from them. But in his early work on the subject, Hawking argued that the truth is more subtle than this monochrome picture.

By applying quantum theory specifically, the idea that pairs of "virtual photons" can spontaneously be created out of nothing he realized that some of these photons would appear to be radiated from the black hole. Now referred to as Hawking radiation, the theory was recently confirmed in a laboratory experiment at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel. In place of a real black hole, the researchers used an acoustic analog a "sonic black hole" from which sound waves cannot escape. They detected the equivalent of Hawking radiation exactly in accordance with the physicist's predictions.

In classical physics, entropy, or the disorder of a system that can only ever increase with time, never decreases. Together with Jacob Bekenstein, Hawking proposed that the entropy of a black hole is measured by the surface area of its surrounding event horizon.

The recent discovery of gravitational waves emitted by merging pairs of black holes shows that Hawking was right again. As Hawking told the BBC after the first such event in 2016, "the observed properties of the system are consistent with predictions about black holes that I made in 1970 ... the area of the final black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the initial black holes." More recent observations have provided further confirmation of Hawking's "area theorem."

So the world is gradually catching up with Stephen Hawking's amazing predictions. But there are still quite a few that have yet to be proven one way or the other:

The existence of Hawking radiation creates a serious problem for theoreticians. It seems to be the only process in physics that deletes information from the universe.

The basic properties of the material that went into making the black hole appear to be lost forever; the radiation that comes out tells us nothing about them. This is the so-called information paradox that scientists have been trying to solve for decades. Hawking's own take on the mystery, which was published in 2016, is that the information isn't truly lost. It's stored in a cloud of zero-energy particles surrounding the black hole, which he dubbed "soft hair." But Hawking's hairy black hole theorem is only one of several hypotheses that have been put forward, and to date no one knows the true answer.

Black holes are created from the gravitational collapse of pre-existing matter such as stars. But it's also possible that some were created spontaneously in the very early universe, soon after the Big Bang.

Hawking was the first person to explore the theory behind such primordial black holes in depth. It turns out they could have virtually any mass whatsoever, from very light to very heavy though the really tiny ones would have "evaporated" into nothing by now due to Hawking radiation. One intriguing possibility considered by Hawking is that primordial black holes might make up the mysterious dark matter that astronomers believe permeates the universe. However, as LiveScience previously reported, current observational evidence indicates that this is unlikely. Either way, we currently don't have observational tools to detect primordial black holes or to say whether they make up dark matter.

One of the topics Hawking tinkered with toward the end of his life was the multiverse theory the idea that our universe, with its beginning in the Big Bang, is just one of an infinite number of coexisting bubble universes.

Hawking wasn't happy with the suggestion, made by some scientists, that any ludicrous situation you can imagine must be happening right now somewhere in that infinite ensemble. So, in his very last paper in 2018, Hawking sought, in his own words, to "try to tame the multiverse." He proposed a novel mathematical framework that, while not dispensing with the multiverse altogether, rendered it finite rather than infinite. But as with any speculation concerning parallel universes, we have no idea if his ideas are right. And it seems unlikely that scientists will be able to test his idea any time soon.

Surprising as it may sound, the laws of physics as we understand them today don't prohibit time travel. The solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity include "closed time-like curves," which would effectively allow you to travel back into your own past. Hawking was bothered by this, because he felt that backward travel in time raised logical paradoxes that simply shouldn't be possible.

So he suggested that some currently unknown law of physics prevents closed timelike curves from occurring his so-called "chronology protection conjecture." But "conjecture" is just science-speak for "guess," and we really don't know whether time travel is possible or not.

One of the questions cosmologists get asked most often is "what happened before the Big Bang?" Hawking's own view was that the question is meaningless. To all intents and purposes, time itself as well as the universe and everything in it began at the Big Bang.

"For me, this means that there is no possibility of a creator," he said, and as LiveScience previously reported, "because there is no time for a creator to have existed in." That's an opinion many people will disagree with, but one that Hawking expressed on numerous occasions throughout his life. It almost certainly falls in the "will never be resolved one way or the other" category.

In his later years, Hawking made a series of bleak prophecies concerning the future of humanity that he may or may not have been totally serious about, BBC reported

These range from the suggestion that the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle," might trigger a vacuum bubble that would gobble up the universe to hostile alien invasions and artificial intelligence (AI) takeovers. Although Stephen Hawking was right about so many things, we'll just have to hope he was wrong about these.

Originally published on Live Science.

Originally posted here:

4 bizarre Stephen Hawking theories that turned out to be right (and 6 we're not sure about) - Livescience.com

Back in the plague year of 1665-1666, Isaac Newton changed the scientific world, discovering the universal law of gravity and the mathematics of calculus. Now, in the plague year of 2020-2021, is history about to repeat itself?

Stephen Wolfram thinks so. The British-born scientist, who lives in the US, claims he has found a route to a fundamental theory of physics that answers some of the biggest questions, such as what is space? What is time? And why does the Universe exist?

To be fair, a lot of the work was done in 2019 and we were about to start speaking about it in March 2020, but everything locked down for COVID, says Wolfram. But it is true to say that we have made more progress towards finding a fundamental theory of physics than I dared believe was possible.

Wolframs starting point was to ask: What is space? Physicists dont often ask this question, he says. They merely think of space as the backdrop against which the events of the Universe play out.

According to Wolfram, space is made of a network of nodes, which are connected to each other. The nature of the connections how each node is linked to nearby and faraway nodes can create a space of any dimension. So if the number of nodes increases as the square of the distance from any given node like the surface area of a sphere the network has the properties of familiar 3D space.

Read more theories of the Universe:

I actually believe the Universe started out with infinitely many dimensions and gradually cooled down to the three we have today, says Wolfram. But I dont yet know why there are precisely three.

Wolfram is interested in what is the minimal stuff needed to create the Universe. And in addition to the network of nodes the atoms of space there is another ingredient, the rules that change the network. So, for instance, a rule will say: wherever there is a particular pattern of nodes, replace it with another particular pattern of nodes.

It is the application of such rules, over and over again the continual updating of the space network that knits together space, says Wolfram. The miracle is that this process can also create all the matter in the Universe and all laws of physics we have discovered over the past 350 years.

Stephen Wolfram Wolfram Research Inc/Tom Straw

Before examining this remarkable claim, it is worth considering how Wolfram got to this point. Born in London in 1959, he was publishing physics papers at the age of 15. As a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he worked with Richard Feynman, arguably the most notable post-war US physicist. But a crucial event for Wolfram was a discovery he made in 1981 when he used a computer to investigate the consequences of simple computer programs ones whose output is repeatedly fed back in as their input, like a snake eating its own tail.

The simplest computer programs he could think of at the time were cellular automata. These are one-dimensional lines of squares, each of which can be empty or filled. A rule is applied that replaces a certain pattern of squares with another. In this way, a new line of squares is created. And another new line. And so on.

Most of the time Wolfram found that nothing interesting happened. In some cases, however, there were persistent features that moved across the evolving cellular grid, reminiscent of subatomic particles in the real world. But the big surprise was that there were a few rules that created never-ending novelty and complexity.

This was a light bulb moment for Wolfram. Usually, simple programs have simple outputs and complex programs have complex outputs. But Wolfram had discovered simple programs with complex outputs. His immediate thought was, Is this how the Universe creates a rose or a newborn baby or a galaxy? Is it merely applying a simple program over and over again?

In 2002, Wolfram published A New Kind Of Science, a 1,200-page tome with 1,000 black-and-white pictures and half a million words. In it, among other things, he explored the consequences of all 256 possible rules for one-dimensional cellular automata, among which was Rule 30, which generated unlimited complexity. The book was met with hostility from the physics community. Partly, it was because he had published it himself without going through the usual peer review process. But another reason was that other physicists could not see how to use his ideas to predict anything useful.

They had a point. Basically, Wolfram was saying that most of what the Universe is doing is computationally irreducible that is, the outcome can be discovered only by running the computer program for the 13.82 billion years the Universe has been in existence. To many other physicists that was a fat lot of good.

But Wolfram was also saying that, within the Universe-generating computation, there are computationally reducible islands, where it is possible to deduce the outcome without actually running the program. These shortcuts are none other than the laws of physics we have discovered, says Wolfram.

In the end, Wolfram did not pursue the ideas he had laid out in A New Kind Of Science. On the one hand, he says, there was no demand from physicists. And on the other hand, there was demand for his software such as the computer language Mathematica and the intelligent search engine WolframAlpha, which had made him a billionaire. He therefore spent the next two decades developing them instead.

But in 2019, he met some young physicists who encouraged him to continue his search for a fundamental, computational theory of physics. And, at the age of 60, it was now or never.

From order there was chaos: Wolframs Rule 30 found that even a simple rule that determines the colour of cells in a row can generate complexity Richard Ling/Wikipedia

The problem with cellular automata is that they run on a pre-existing grid. Wolfram realised quickly that he needed something simpler, even more basic. This is how he hit on the idea of a self-updating space network. There are persistent features in the networks, rather like vortices in water, and these are matter. Ultimately, then, everything arises from space. There is nothing else. Actually, that is not entirely true. There is one other thing. Time, which everyone since Einstein has thought is the same as space, isnt, says Wolfram. Time is actually the process of step-by-step computation.

One of the problems with Wolframs earlier approach was that, if he found the program that is generating the Universe and he believed it might be no longer than four lines of code in his own computer language, Mathematica the question would then arise, why this program and not another? Wolfram therefore hit on the idea that the Universe is being generated byall possible programs running simultaneously.

At first sight it seems unbelievably messy. How can anything useful come out of this? he says. But the miracle is that everything does, including the twin pillars of modern physics: Einsteins theory of gravity [General Relativity] and quantum theory.

The key thing is to realise that we are not observing the Universe from outside. That is impossible. Instead, we are pieces of self-updating space network within the overall self-updating space network of the Universe. Not only are we limited in the amount of computation we can do and so unable to perceive most of the irreducible computation going on all around us but we are also limited by our biology, which causes us to impose a single thread of time on what we see. Despite the fact that all possible rules are actually operating, our sampling will reveal a single rule generating the Universe, says Wolfram.

Read more about cosmology:

Crucially, our fundamental limitations do not permit us to see the atoms of space. Instead, we see them linked together to make a smooth continuum a continuum, furthermore, that is described by General Relativity. In Einsteins theory, masses like planets follow the shortest path, or geodesic, through space-time. Space-time is in turn warped by the presence of energy (strictly speaking, energy-momentum). According to Wolfram, energy in his picture is nothing more than the amount of activity going on at any location in the network, and it is this computation that ultimately bends the geodesics of massive bodies.

Quantum theory, in contrast, describes the microscopic realm of atoms and their constituents, and is notorious for appearing fundamentally incompatible with General Relativity. Specifically, there is no such thing as a unique path through space. Atoms can follow multiple paths, each with an associated probability. According to Wolfram, this multiple history is built into his framework because, each time a piece of space network is updated, it can be updated by not just one rule but multiple possible rules, leading to multiple histories. Quantum theory is not a bolt-on, as in standard physics, he says.

Wolfram goes further. He imagines a branchial space that encapsulates all these multiple histories. And this requires the tools of Mathematica to visualise, which is one reason why other physicists, not just mere mortals, find it hard to follow Wolfram. However, the key thing Wolfram claims is that General Relativity, with its geodesics bent by energy-momentum in normal space, is exactly the same as quantum theory with its geodesics bent by energy-momentum in branchial space. General Relativity and quantum theory are basically the same theory! he says. I never expected to discover such a lovely result.

This is indeed an astonishing result. In mainstream physics, only string theory provides a framework that unites General Relativity and quantum theory, and it has big problems, not least the fact that it leads not to a single Universe but to a multiverse of about 10,500 universes. There is a strong hint, however, known as the holographic principle, that quantum theory and General Relativity are intimately connected and that quantum theory manifests itself as General Relativity in a higher dimensional space. Wolfram sees his work as confirming this connection.

Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseilles University works on loop quantum gravity, a rival of string theory, which attempts to show that space-time, down at the impossibly small Planck scale, is made of finite loops woven together into a complex shifting network. Is there any connection between Wolframs work and loop quantum gravity? Indeed, I have been curious about the same question! says Rovelli.

Others find Wolframs work fascinating. One is Gregory Chaitin, the Argentinian-American who invented a field of mathematics algorithmic information theory when he was 15. I personally think his new work is very interesting, he says. And, yes, something like General Relativity and like quantum mechanics emerges rather naturally.

Chaitin likes the originality of Wolframs approach. What is fun is that this is completely orthogonal [distinct] to what everyone else is doing. Up to now, string theory has been the only game in town that attempts to operate at this level. Now there is another game.

Artists impression of the Universe, with galaxy clusters concentrated at nodes Science Photo Library

Wolfram is encouraged by the response to his latest work, which is very different to the response he experienced in 2002. He says lots of the young physicists are attending his seminars, and older physicists are sending their students. He is live-streaming a lot of the development on the web so people can see what he is doing. I have been surprised at how few people have said this cant possibly work, says Wolfram. Its been more like I cant understand this or tell us what phenomena we can look for.

Wolfram is also not alone, as he was in 2002. He now has a handful of other physicists working with him. Chaitin thinks this is significant. Unusually for Stephen, he even gives co-author credit to some, he says. But one of the major differences between now and 2002 is the idea that information-processing is at the heart of the Universe is far more mainstream than it was two decades ago. In a way, nothing Wolfram is doing is contradicting accepted physics. He is merely attempting to go beneath the bonnet of the car to reveal the computation that both generates the Universe and the laws of physics that we observe.

One consequence of Wolframs picture is that aliens with different biologies and different senses may see different parts of the Universe-generating computation and therefore deduce different laws from quantum theory and General Relativity. In fact, they may forever be invisible to us, existing in parts of the space network our senses are simply not sampling. Our view is limited by our size of about a metre in height and our insistence on seeing a single thread of time, says Wolfram. But creatures the size of the planet and without this insistence would see something entirely different.

In the end, it will be predictions of new phenomena that will confirm or refute Wolframs computational universe. And at the moment these are lacking. However, Wolfram sees places that may be fruitful in yielding observational predictions. For instance, he believes there could be domains of our Universe with different numbers of dimensions. And, in particular, he suspects the black holes may be able to spin faster than permitted by standard physics and, in doing so, whole chunks of space-time may break off, something which is impossible in General Relativity.

Read more about the Universe:

The big question remains, why is there a Universe? And here Wolfram thinks the Universe may exist in the much the same sense that mathematics exists. Mathematics consists of a set of givens, or axioms, and the consequences, or theorems, that can be deduced from them by applying the rules of logic. Similarly, the Universe is merely the logical consequence of applying all possible rules to a network of disembodied nodes. It is inevitable that it exists, in the same way it is inevitable that 1+1=2, he says.

We, of course, experience the Universe as a solid thing, not an abstract thing like the edifice of mathematics. However, since we are also made of the same stuff as the Universe like virtual creatures in a virtual reality everything appears solidly real to us.

Whether or not Wolfram turns out to be the new Newton, the plague year has definitely played to Wolframs strengths. I have always worked remotely from my company, he says. This last year has suited me. He admits there is still a long way to go in getting a fundamental theory of physics. But I am amazed how far things have progressed in a short time, he says. I never imagined it would work this well.

Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist and physicist. He is the author ofA New Kind of Science and created the programming software Mathematica and the computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha.

Continue reading here:

Inside the simple computer program that could explain why the Universe exists at all - BBC Science Focus Magazine

Do you have free will? Can you make your own decisions? Or are you more like an automaton, just moving as required by your constituent parts? Probably, like most people, you feel you have something called free will. Your decisions are not predetermined; you could do otherwise.

Yet scientists can tell you that you are made up of atoms and molecules and that they are governed by the laws of physics. Fundamentally, then in terms of atoms and molecules we can predict the future for any given starting point. This seems to leave no room for free will, alternative actions, or decisions.

Confused? You have every right to be. This has been one of the long outstanding unresolved problems in philosophy. There has been no convincing resolution, though speculation has included a key role for quantum theory, which describes the uncertainty of nature at the smallest scales. It is this that has fascinated me. My research interests include the foundations of quantum theory. So could free will be thought of as a macroscopic quantum phenomenon? I set out to explore the question.

There is enough philosophy literature on the subject to fill a small library. As a trained scientist I approached the problem by asking: what is the evidence? Sadly, in some ways, my research showed no link between free will and fundamental physics. Decades of philosophical debate as to whether free will could be a quantum phenomenon has been chasing an unfounded myth.

Imagine you are on stage, facing two envelopes. You are told that one has 100 inside and the other is empty. You have a free choice to pick one yet every time the magician wins, and you pick the empty one. This implies that our sense of free will is not quite as reliable as we think it is or at least that its subject to manipulation, if it is there.

This is just one of a wide variety of examples that question our awareness of our own decision-making processes. Evidence from psychology, sociology, and even neuroscience all give the same message that we are unaware of how we make decisions. And our own introspection is unreliable as evidence of how our mental processes function.

So, what is the evidence for the abstract concept of free will? None. How could we test for it? We cant. How could we recognize it? We cant. The supposed connection between our perception of free will and the uncertainty inherent to quantum theory is, therefore, unsupported by the evidence.

But we do have an experience of free will, and this experience is a fact. So having debunked the supposed link with fundamental physics, I wanted to go further and explore why we have a perception of being able to do otherwise. That perception has nothing to do with knowing the exact position of every molecule in our bodies, but everything to do with how we question and challenge our decision-making in a way that really does change our behavior.

For me as a scientist, this meant building a model of free will and testing it. But how would you do this? Could I mimic it with a computer program? If I were successful how would my computer or robot be tested?

The topic is fuelled by prejudice. You would probably assume without evidence that my brother has free will, but my computer does not. So I will offer an emotionally neutral challenge: if an alien lands on Earth, how would you decide if it was an alien being with free will like us, or a sophisticated automaton?

Strangely, the philosophical literature does not seem to consider tests for free will. But as a scientist, it was essential to have a test for my model. So here is my answer: if you are right-handed, you will write your name holding a pen in your right hand. You will do so predictably almost 100% of the time. But you have free will, you could do otherwise. You can prove it by responding to a challenge or even challenging yourself. Given a challenge you may well write with your left hand. That is a highly discerning test of free will. And you can probably think of others, not just finely balanced 50:50 choices, but really rare events that show your independence and distinguish you from an automaton.

Based on this, I would test my alien with a challenge to do something unusual and useless, perhaps slightly harmful even, like putting its hand near a flame. I would take that as evidence of free will. After all, no robot would be programmed to do that.

And so I tried to model that behavior in the simplest most direct way, starting with a generic goal-seeking computer program that responds to inputs from the environment. These programs are commonly used across disciplines from sociology, economics, and AI. The goal-seeking program is so general that it applies to simple models of human behavior, but also to hardware like the battery saving program in your mobile phone.

For free will, we add one more goal: to assert independence. The computer program is then designed to satisfy this goal or desire by responding to challenges to do otherwise. Its as simple as that. Test it out yourself, the challenges can be external or you can generate your own. After all, isnt that how you conclude that you have free will?

In principle, the program can be implemented in todays computers. It would have to be sophisticated enough to recognize a challenge and even more so to generate its own challenges. But this is well within reach of current technology. That said, Im not sure that I want my own personal computer exercising free will, though.

This article byMark Hadley, Visiting Academic in Physics, University of Warwick isrepublished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Link:

Can we build a computer with free will? - The Next Web

Of all the folks ambling around the folksy-cute rock-climbing community of Squamish, British Columbia, which is about 65 miles north of the U.S. border, no one is more perplexed by the unsolved 2017 murder of a onetime neo-Nazi troublemaker lunatic named Davis Wolfgang Hawke than his last girlfriend, Eva McLennan, who knew him only by how he first introduced himself, as Jesse James, avid vegan cragsman, adventurer, technologist, futurist, nutritionist, philosopher, writer, occasional poet, ex-officer in the Israeli Defense Force, and holder of a theoretical physics Ph.D. from Stanford. If that seems like a lot to take in, just imagine how it was for her. The guy shed been in love with was pretty much just a spectral figment of his own imagination. Even his theoretical degree was purely theoretical.

The Rise + Fall of the Campus Nazi

The fullness of this realization didnt happen right away. First came the murder, him found shot inside his 2000 GMC Yukon XL, which is where he lived, off a service road outside of town, digging the peripatetic so-called vanlife, the truck then torched such that youd never know it was once bright red. All his gear vanished in the inferno, too his climbing stuff, two phones, two laptops, a bunch of USB drives, everything. At the time, McLennan spent her nights in a tent a short distance away and stumbled upon the scene expecting only to enjoy another day of climbing the areas many outcroppings and crags. Their last words to each other were Good night, sweet dreams, I love you. Instead, chaos and upheaval and death and cops.

The vehicle was unrecognizable to me, McLennan says, morosely.

In the aftermath, she told the police all she could, especially about the Bitcoin fortune Hawke said he possessed, worth millions, if not at least a billion, which may have been the killers motive. But she couldnt supply the one bit of information the police really needed in order to move forward, Jesse James real name. For two years the pair went out, spending every waking moment together, and she didnt have a clue. So, the case went cold, until late last year, when a DNA match finally surfaced and James suddenly became Hawke, 38 at the time of his murder, and all that he was and wasnt.

McLennan, of course, was floored.

When the news reached me, I was pretty shocked, too. Id spent a week or two with Hawke back in 1999, when he was a 20-year-old student at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, to write a piece for Rolling Stone about his allegiance to the former German fhrer (Rise and Fall of the Campus Nazi, RS 823). Our introduction took place inside a crappy hot-tin trailer, me ushered into his office by his then-frulein to find Hawke sitting behind a massive desk dressed in full SS-black Nazi regalia, including the requisite swastika armband, tied-back ponytail, a sparse Hitleresque push-broom mustache, a German Luger pistol resting conspicuously a few inches from his trigger finger and looking not at all like the highly rated chess-playing geek he was as a kid. Only Hawke wasnt Hawke in 1999. He was Commander Bo Decker, founding leader of the American Nationalist Party. He called his gun-toting followers, whom he numbered in the hundreds, the Knights of Freedom. It was all kind of insane and delusional, what with him going on about the inevitable day (I do have a sense of imperium) when hed become president of the United States, thereafter to deport all blacks, sterilize all Jews, and execute all gays.

A few weeks later, I met with him again, in Washington, D.C. He was supposed to lead a big rally there, and the cops turned out in force. But hardly anybody showed up and Hawke fled the scene, thoroughly humiliated, disbanding his party shortly thereafter and disappearing from sight, much to the dismay of some of his Knights.

That is desertion in the face of the enemy, one of his fellow racists told me. Normally, youd be shot for that.

Davis Wolfgang Hawke, circa 2005

Tacosonsunday/Wikipedia Commons

After that, I didnt think about Hawke again for another five years, until he resurfaced as the central character in a 2004 book called Spam Kings, with author Brian McWilliams dubbing him the Spam Nazi. Turns out hed reinvented himself as one of the first pariahs to flood the nations email inboxes with unsolicited come-ons for various girl-wowing sex pheromones, pyramid schemes, loans, penis-enlargement pills, and instructions for how you, too, can become a spammer scammer just like him. He was damn good at it, too, netting somewhere over $100,000 a month, which he converted into gold. In 2005, however, AOL sued him and won a $12.8 million judgment, after which, presto chango, he went back underground, this time determined to stay in the shadows. And it wasnt only because of the AOL fiasco. At some point, he ditched his gold and piled the proceeds into Bitcoin, which had started another of its periodic runs, levering his wallet into the stratosphere and earning him, he told McLennan, multiple international threats, including the unwanted attention of the Russian mafia.

And thats about all he told her about his past. Almost everything else, he kept tamped down and hidden. One biggie is that he was Jewish by birth, a fact that he hated almost from the start, which is why, two days after graduating from high school, he marched over to the courthouse and legally jettisoned his given name, Andrew Britt Greenbaum, of the Boston Greenbaums, in favor of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, of the who-knows-where. And, for McLennan, it seems that shocks like these will never stop coming.

Frankly, Im terrified about what else Im going to learn about him, she says. Its like, What else is there? What else you got? Is there more stuff that goes beyond hate speech? I couldnt tell you. I dont know.

So there she is, way up in British Columbia, all of 26 years old, knowing more than she did before but not knowing the one thing she herself wants to know most: who killed her boyfriend and why.

When people think of Squamish, they generally dont think of murdered Jewish chess-whiz Nazis-turned-cryptocurrency-fortune-hunters. Historically, its mostly been a simple forestry and climbing community, with many of the climbers enjoying what has come to be called vanlife hundreds of them, according to one estimate, living out of what they drive, much to the dismay of some of the towns establishment realtors, council members, and the like. For the van folk, its all about the giant granite monolith known as Stawamus Chief and the 800-plus climbing routes bolted into its sheer walls, slabs, dykes, and cracks, with 1,500 other routes scattered throughout the area, leading to Squamishs reputation as Yosemite North. Of course, if you wanted, or needed, to go someplace and live not only off the grid but as a new person altogether, with a past worth escaping, there could be no finer place. You could even go by an obvious fabrication of a name like Jesse James and no one would notice or care. For her part, McLennan morphed into BigAbi Garbanzo, though for no shady reasons of her own. It was James idea that she take on an assumed name, to try to help insulate herself from those multiple international threats. Its also the reason I cant talk about my past. I cant have anybody knowing who I am, he told her. So, if youre going to be attached to me, choose an alias.

Their life together seems pretty idyllic, living like nomads, no need for jobs, Hawke financing everything, bathing in local creeks not because they had to but because they wanted to. Hawke had started climbing in 2009 and by 2015 was thoroughly accomplished, going so far as to pass himself off as a guide, though he held no official credentials. He wouldnt climb with his girlfriend, however, until she learned the necessary skills on her own. When it came to BigAbi, it seems, he was protective like that.

It was somewhat different for his neo-Nazi-years partner, Patricia Lingenfelter, 32 at the time, also known as Knights of Freedom chief party secretary Frulein Lingenfelter. Near as I could tell, she did nothing without Deckers explicit instructions. He told her to call him Commander, nothing else, so she did, as faithfully as she could, though on occasion, shed mess up and call him dude, which he let pass without comment. If she wanted to go into his office, she had to ask for permission via walkie-talkie. He was constantly getting speeding tickets, so she did most of the driving, with him calling out every move slow down now, speed up now, pass that guy now, turn now. One morning, Lingenfelter appeared in the trailers kitchen wearing fatigues and a white T-shirt and said, happily, I was feeling a little more militant today. The Commander looked her over, shrugged, looked at how junked up the trailer was, and said, Try to get [the place] a little more presentable. It looks disgusting, frankly. She said, Yes, sir, seeming to take it all in stride.

The Commander himself wouldnt acknowledge that he was in a relationship with Lingenfelter or that hed ever even had a girlfriend. Love, he told me, is just not my cup of tea. I admit it freely: Im a control freak. If Im not in control of the situation, Im unhappy. If Im not interacting with someone where Im on a superior level, Im uncomfortable. In all of my social relationships, I tend to be the superior. Even in this one, because if I didnt want you here, you wouldnt be here. Youre completely subordinate to me.

He smiled at me, and I smiled at him. Like most people, Ive never met a neo-Nazi that I liked, but the Commander and I got along just fine. I even grew to enjoy his company, attending classes with him, going to court with him to deal with his lead-foot tickets, waltzing into the police station at the request of a local detective who rocked back and said he wanted to talk to him in private. Thats when, for a brief moment, the Commander appointed me KOFs official media representative, who he wouldnt go anywhere without for his own protection. The cop groaned and told us to beat it. We had a good laugh about that.

Later in the day, back at his trailer, he went on as usual racist this, racist that when, out of the blue, his wolf-dog peed on the kitchen floor, and he said, Bad dog, baaaad dog, and nuzzled it fondly on the head. Me, Im a sucker for kindness to animals, though I draw the line at Hitler himself, who was known to be a major dog lover, favoring his German shepherd Blondi over even his own frulein, Eva Braun.

Hawke in an undated photo taken in his dorm at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina

Gerry Pate/"Spartanburg Herald-Journal/"AP Images

After that, the Commander was only to happy to hang loose in his office, massive desk in a tiny room, and blue-sky about first actions hed take as president. Among other things: Hed legalize marijuana, though not heroin or cocaine, and of course, gone right away would be speed limits on the nations roads. He would deport nonwhite gays, but white homosexuals will be executed. Rape somebody and expect the victims family to come over and wipe yours out, legally. They can exact revenge if they want. My system will discourage crime.

I asked him about vices.

Vices? Ive never touched a cigarette, never been drunk, never touched pot. But, as you know, I do speed. I do everything too fast: eat, drive, walk.

Heres a vice: vanity, said Lingenfelter.

Im not vain, the Commander said, sneering at her.

So, thats the kind of guy he was back in 1999. By the time he arrived in Squamish and became Jesse James, however, he seems to have changed almost beyond understanding or even possibility.

I dont think his Nazism was an act, says McLennan. Its just that I saw no signs of it, absolutely none. I found no signs of anti-Semitism or racism, and I went out with him for two years. This may sound stupid or naive of me, but I know that he was very honest with me on a day-to-day basis. Our life together was climbing, which he took very seriously. We lived and breathed climbing together. And I know that I knew him well, in terms of us as climbing partners, making life-and-death choices together. But of course I feel guilty for not knowing more about his past. I mean, I didnt even know he was the penis-enlargement king.

She halfway laughs about the absurdity of that alone, then takes a deep breath and goes on: He was the first person in my life to really love and look after me. He was a tremendous friend, super-considerate and supportive. I cant rewrite history to pretend I hate the guy. I dont hate him. He had rules for not celebrating birthdays, but he did celebrate mine. He was wonderful to me, and we were really good to each other. You couldnt ask for a better partner.

When she says things like this, theres so much sadness in her voice, but happiness, too, for having finally found the kind of love that regenerates itself, building over time instead of declining and fading. But then it was ripped away. Theres no weeping or sobbing about it, though. Maybe thats not her. At the same time, you can tell shes still suffering and still confused.

Eva McLennan

Yvette Brend/CBC News

She isnt climbing much, or at all, anymore, largely due to a fall she took shortly after Hawkes murder. She face-planted into rocks from 70 feet up, broken bones everywhere, ribs, pelvis, hip, nose, eye socket, a punctured vertebrae, a case of amnesia that lasted for two weeks and a brain injury that she calls severe. Within a year, shed stopped climbing altogether. I used to do a lot of free solo climbing, but I just dont trust myself anymore, and for climbing, you really need to trust your mind. And she cant. And she no longer has any backup. Just one more loss.

For everything Hawke was around McLennan, his rep around Squamish was somewhat different. More than anything, he just seemed to be pompous and preening and still possessed of feelings of superiority and the old imperium. Maybe he no longer wanted to become president in order to deport, sterilize, and execute, but he still wanted everyone to know how great he was, and hed often write about it online, either on Facebook or on one of the several blogs he maintained, among them SurvivorMan.net, in which he extolled the virtues of what I call the Survive Diet, the aim of which is eternal life. He only ate raw, organic, vegan, gluten-free foods, no sugar ever, but a ton of Zimt chocolate. Zimt chocolate is quite possibly the BEST raw chocolate Ive ever eaten, he once wrote, and Ive eaten a whole lot of raw chocolate!

On occasion, you could find him in the heart of downtown Squamish, inside the 1914 Coffee Company cafe, jawboning about the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics, for instance, and looking down on anyone who demonstrated what he called the horrifying traits of a scientific instrumentalist, which themselves, he liked to say, prompted me to ditch academia out of boredom during my physics postdoc, which of course he never ditched because he never was in any doc, post or otherwise. No matter. Hed go on to make various abstruse points about, say, Shors algorithm or the adiabatic quantum algorithm, sounding very much like TVs Sheldon Cooper, who is just as much a fiction as Hawke himself was.

Other times, hed drive his Yukon north of town to the Ground Up Climbing Center, just off of Commercial, to play ping-pong and crow over his wins. (I have not lost a game in a long time!) Or else hed be sitting at a table inside Starbucks or Nesters Food Mart, sponging off the free internet connections, hunched over his laptop, which hed snap shut if you came up to him. He was always really weird about shutting his laptop right away as soon as youd approach, recalls a climber named Nicole Deuchar. He was the kind of person who never told you too much about himself. Dont take a picture of my face, dont do that, hed say. He was always super-mysterious.

And a climber named John Shaw says, Our conversations were always friendly, but it was always like he was hiding something. Like, Fuck, dude youre sneaky. Another thing Shaw noticed: His teeth were yellow. He said he had all this money, but he fucking doesnt go to the dentist? I just found it odd.

Yellow teeth or no, however, give him a chance and hed open his mouth to tell you he hadnt had a cold in 15 years, had 20/20 vision, and that during his seven years of daily climbing he had never messed up and hurt himself, not even once. Then hed go on about being a hobbyist molecular geneticist who spends more than $3,000 a month on supplements, with plans to live forever.

Along the way, hed post inflammatory, long-winded climbing essays on the internet with titles like A Guide to Sandbagging Newbies and Sport Climbers on Squamishs Grand Wall, which you dont even need to be a climber to get the gist of, and features him taking some new climber to one of the areas most dangerous hunks of rock, the idea being, Lets put this guy to the test, knowing but not caring how itd go for the fellow if he fell and what happened to the human body as it bobbed and bounced off slab on a 20-meter pendulum whip. No blood came of it, but by days end, Hawke had pawned the guy off on another climber while he himself sprinted across the ledge to eat lunch and admire the view.

The online response from local climbers was not pretty. They called him one weird dude, a total dickwad, and a real douche bag, and said he must be suffering from a severe mental problem. A guy name Jesse wrote, I think it sucks ball smegma that every time someone calls me by name at the crag, I have to spend 20 F%$#$&^ minutes explaining who I am not. Another: Our few encounters in the bluffs have been enough for me to pick another crag if I notice him around.

No doubt Hawke just shrugged and went back to his ping-pong game. He may have lived in the shadows, but he couldnt help but make public pronouncements that made it seem like only he deserved sunshine.

My friends are always mildly flabbergasted to learn that I havent spoken to my family in over 15 years, he wrote in 2016. This is not due to a bad childhood or any particular animosity but simply the result of cold logic. Sharing some common strands of DNA is a flimsy prerequisite for a relationship. He also complained that 99.99% of the people on this planet are just wasting time before time wastes them. Among those he approved of: Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk. And himself. I am trying my best to be one of those .01%.

But then he got wasted, not by time itself but just in the time it took for someone to pull a trigger and light a match.

So far, British Columbias Integrated Homicide Investigation Team seems to have made absolutely no progress on the case.

Sgt. Frank Jang of British Columbias Integrated Homicide Investigation Team

IHIT

Were not even quite sure if its a culpable or non-culpable homicide, says IHIT spokesman Frank Jang. Its not completely out of the realm of possibility that someone could have discharged a firearm and unknowingly hit and killed him, a bullet ricocheting, one in a million. Or it could be somebody hunted him down for his gold or his Bitcoin and decided to kill him. Only after we found out who he was until then, we just thought he was a homeless person were like, you know, this could be a weird plot where somebody finally came to finish off the scum Nazi. There are so many different possibilities, but it definitely wasnt suicide. Somebody shot him. As to who did it, your guess is as good as ours. We average about one homicide a week here, and theres really no precedent on our part for this one. Its really left us scratching our heads.

McLennan thinks theyve simply given up and stopped trying. And it makes her furious.

IHIT betrays their duty and is a shameless disgrace, she wrote on Facebook, after Sgt. Jang appeared in a newspaper story saying that Hawke perhaps slept in his vehicle and perhaps had a heat source inside, when he knew full well that Hawke was a committed vanlifer and that, no, he didnt have an external heat source that could have led to the inferno. Fuck Frank Jang & several others up next. The bastards. After how many hundreds of fucking hours of taped interviews and phone calls and emails? I know a statement of war when I see one. These negligent imbeciles have failed their homicide victim. CAN I SPEAK TO THE JANITOR???

In the meantime, Hawkes father, Hyman, has offered a $10,000 reward for tips leading to the killers arrest, but, near as I can tell, no one has stepped forward. I tried calling him to chat about it, left several messages, but he didnt get back to me. I didnt talk to him in 1999, either, but I did speak, at length, to his wife, Peggy, who died in 2018. She spent a good portion of that conversation in tears over the lost soul of her only son.

What Hawke told me about his parents is that they were upper-middle class, that his mom wasnt very bright, and that his father, a mathematician, was actually his stepfather and would be among the Jews sterilized in due time (Its a must). He said his real father was some German man his mom had an affair with, which she wouldnt deny to me, for fear that her Britt (she called him by his middle name) would never talk to her again.

He was a brilliant student, she said, with his chess achievements often making the local paper, sometimes on the front page, which came with a heavy price.

He was beaten up in elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she told me. Every day for two years in middle school, two boys would come in before class, one would hold his arm down and the other would beat relentlessly on his hand. But being a boy, he was too ashamed to tell me about it.

One day, I went into his room as he was changing his shirt, and I saw black-and-blue marks and scratches all over his back, and I asked him what happened, and he made up a story. But months later, he acknowledged that some children had thrown him over a chair.

He was a nerd, and he was bullied, and what can I do about it? He was abused by the other children. They werent black children or Jewish children, they were just children, though he was called names. She took a deep breath and continued on: I mean, how can you get rid of someone calling you a Jew and a kike? How can you ever get rid of that? Hes so ashamed. People have made him so ashamed of who he is. Hell never stop. Im afraid hell never stop. Hes gone in too deeply.

During high school in Westwood, Massachusetts, Hawke was obsessed with two things. The first was chess, which he played with such skill that for two years he was top dog in the state.

One of his high-school-classmate opponents remembered him this way: [He was] a pale, skinny, intimidatingly brilliant, terminally aloof kid. Initially he refused to even play against me. Until I formally tried out for the team, I wasnt worth his time. Even then, he took pains to make it clear he didnt consider me a worthy opponent. He played the whole, painfully brief game with headphones on, barely looking at the board, making split-second moves. In three years, I never saw him lose a game. My senior year, after he graduated and I took over as captain, kids at chess meets in neighboring towns would shake in their sneakers when they saw us coming: Is Greenbaum still with you?'

Hawkes other childhood obsession was knives. I was very wealthy as a child, he told me. Id get $1,000 every Christmas, and $500 or so on birthdays. I spent it all on knives. My room had so many knives you really couldnt move without stepping on a knife.

By the end of his senior year, hed read Mein Kampf, heard destiny calling, formed his first hate group, and begun handing out fliers on Bostons streets. Soon enough, he was down in South Carolina, going to college and working to expand his dreams of world domination, mainly via the auspices of the internet.

My sense of historical destiny is what makes me what I am, he told me one day inside his trailer, while dropping goldfish into a fish tank for his pet red-bellied piranha. Among those other first acts as president: to remove Benjamin Franklin and put Hitler on the $100 bill. Actually, he mused, I might put Hitler on both the 100 and the one.

The rally in Washington was meant to be his biggest neo-Nazi achievement to date. The Washington Post wrote up his plans and the D.C. cops turned out in force, 2,000-men strong near Lafayette Square, on foot, on horseback, on rooftops, in helicopters. But by that time, Hawke knew that his supposed followers were a feckless lot, so off he and Lingenfelter sped, back to Wofford College as fast as they could go, abandoning the few that did make the trip. And those few were beyond pissed.

Hes a yellow-bellied coward, a Jewish coward, one of them said.

Another: The kid was gifted. He was dynamic, intelligent, articulate. He was young. He could give a damn good speech. All right, so he had a few problems. But tell me, who doesnt have problems? And then just to chuck it away, to fucking pour it down the drain on the day hed spent a year and a half waiting for I grieve for him. Its just a damn shame. It just breaks my heart. He paused for a moment, then said, Heil Hitler.

Meanwhile, his mothers last words to me before hanging up in tears continued to echo through my head, and they continue to this day.

I honestly hope that someone, when he goes to class today, kills him. Thats what I hope. I want him to be dead. Hes no longer the son I knew. Seems like wherever he went, he left broken hearts behind, until his mother, 18 years after the fact, finally got her wish.

Nobody who knew him in Squamish really wants to talk about Hawke or say anything: good, bad, indifferent. I exchanged a few messages with his girlfriend prior to BigAbi Garbanzo, and unless I was willing to offer compensation, she wasnt going to say a thing. I dont blame her. In a woke world, charges of toxicity by association can be a very dangerous thing. In passing, however, she did mention that shed gone out with him for eight years, so if BigAbi saw him for two years and he died in 2017, then he must have arrived in Canada around 2007 at the latest, assuming no girlfriend overlap.

After giving up the Nazi business in 1999, he (and Lingenfelter) next resurfaced back on the Eastern seaboard, in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where, under various assumed names (Johnny Durango, Winston Cross, Clell Miller, among others), he set about pioneering, for lack of a better term, those many uses and abuses of spam, enlisting the help of some of his chess buddies and making a fortune.

His business partner at the time was a future New Hampshire chess master named Brad Bournival, who today says, I personally never really saw clear signs of racism when I was with him. I think that whole Nazi thing was just to get attention. His idol growing up was Bobby Fischer, who was half-Jewish, too, and also into the Nazi thing. So, in some respects, I think he was kind of imitating Bobby Fischer.

As far as I know, this is the first time anyone has ever posited a Fischer-Nazi connection but it makes sense, how a young outcast looking up to one of the greatest chess players of all time might take on various of that elders attitudes and beliefs wholesale, if only as a matter of escapism although, of course, it takes a certain kind of someone to try to make them real.

Wyoming LostNmissing, Inc

He came through our club a couple of times, a chess player wrote on one forum. He faced his knights backwards. Which I found a pretty silly attempt to look like a radical nonconformist. Alas, he kicked my butt.

He called himself Walter Smith then and, to the best of anyones understanding, never again appeared anywhere using his legal name, until it was foisted upon him as a corpse, late last year, when the University of North Texas Unidentified Human Remains Lab matched a sample of his DNA to that of his parents and suddenly everyone in his orbit was at least that much the wiser, if no less mystified or enlightened.

In terms of a motive for his murder, McLennan told me, according to him, hed say, I have many hundreds of million dollars worth of cryptocurrency. Ive contemplated he was hacking into things in the cryptocurrency space, to get so much money. But I have to wonder if other things were going on, too. My personal thought on his murder is that it was a contract killing to do with cryptocurrency. He had some of the largest holdings in the world. I wonder if a silencer was used, because people were around. And Id assume an accelerant was used, given how extreme the fire was.

Since we first spoke, BigAbi has stopped communicating with me, thinking that I was asking leading questions in order to trap her into saying that it was definitely a security breach of some kind that definitely led the Russian mafia to kill her boyfriend.

I never said a security breach happened, she wrote me. That is one possibility I was explaining re bitcoin risks. I never said threats were made to him. I said large bitcoin wallets can be exposed to threats re. risk of theft. Your listening skills were an outrage Recommend you stick to celebrities in mansions, not unsolved murder victims. Not interested in your leading questions any further.

I found this somewhat perplexing, since all Id done is ask her to clarify her earlier statements about the Russian mafia, to which she responded, Im not saying the Russian mafia did it. Im saying thats the way he talked about the threats against him. I dont know how seriously to take it, or how seriously to take the words Russian mafia, but that was how he talked.

After a while, I began to think there was more going on here than the cascading effects of a simple misunderstanding. Hope the story doesnt happen, she wrote in her last message. She also tried to dissuade me from the possibility of visiting Squamish, saying that a new mayor has begun introducing changes to do away with vanlife and that the town is no longer like the one she lived in with Hawke.

But at one point she also said, Right now, Im scared of coming across like a lovesick widow. I never expected my name to be connected to this kind of thing, and Im like, What the fuck have I gotten myself into? You know? I dont regret the choice but Im reconsidering the whole thing.

Again, I can see why. Toxicity by association. But a short while later, she showed up in the local press once more, giving an interview in which she said, Im not going to let it rest. Hes with me for life. In an accompanying photograph, shes wearing a massive coonskin cap with one helluva bushy tail and looking quite glamorous. Naturally, the missing Bitcoin fortune that could now be worth billions was also a big part of the piece. And between those two things McLennans photograph and the lost fortune posters in the comments section were unrelenting in their criticism.

Running bits of it together, heres how it went: She wants the bitcoin, no other reason! [] I wouldnt give up either those Bitcoin passcodes worth billions might be her driving force I meant, love. Love must be the reason why. [] Is that a poor raccoon on her head? [] Its a wealthy raccoon if they ever find the bitcoin. [] Police do actual police work in BC? Good luck with that. If nobody is telling, the BC keystones have no clue. Who gets the bitcoins? [] Whoever finds the password. Which if you really look at it thats the missing piece from this entire article. Its all about the password. Everything else is pure b.s. Only toward the end did someone show a little heart, writing, Good luck, keep searching, everyone deserves a conclusion to their story, even Neo-Nazis.

Id say the same should also be true for McLennan, a conclusion to her time with the guy, even if he was a neo-Nazi. She was in love, and sometimes that trumps all. For what its worth, nothing could be more horrific to me than the revelations about him, she told me. Youre not going to find a shred of anti-Semitism or racism in me. I know people were super-upset about it. Its not like its a wonderful thing to go acting like youre lovesick over somebody who turns out to be a Nazi. I understand thats upsetting to people, and Im pretty much a total pariah around here. [But] all I care about is his murder being solved.

The only thing I find unsettling about any of this is how the Squamish community has failed to rally around her in some big fashion, if only because she was in the dark as much as anyone and to blame her for that just seems wrong. Its not like, while she was off sleeping in her tent, Hawke was stripping down and suiting up in his Nazi regalia of old, Luger at the fore.

Of course, its so easy for people to say she should have known. At one point, in a confessional moment, Hawke had halfway tried to blurt it out. He told her what hed looked like in the past. She said, So you wore combat boots and a trench coat and a long ponytail. Was this a goth phase? He said, I wasnt a goth. Im not sure you would have liked me back then. She said, Probably not.

When we spoke, she said, Im glad I said that and didnt say, No matter what, I would have loved you. Its a fucking good thing I didnt say that, but I guess I feel kind of bad that I missed the message.

Heres how I see it, however. If Hawke could slip past the U.S. border into Canada undetected and remain there for at least a decade, just a homeless guy living in his vehicle (with a $12.8 million judgment hanging over his head), then slipping undetected into someones heart was, for him, probably just as easy.

Meanwhile, Bournival isnt quite so sure that his buddy is even dead and gone. I almost think somehow he found a way to fake his death, because that would be totally his style, he tells me. I remember him even talking about doing stuff like that. I mean, if he did fake it, itd look exactly like that a burnt-out car and a body burned to where its hard to I.D. Most likely its probably real that hes dead. But in my own mind, I still think theres a chance.

Jesse James, a.k.a. Hawke, in Squamish, B.C., in 2015

Nicole Deuchar

In the past few months, Ive spent countless hours digging down into Hawkes digital footprint as Jesse James and have found nothing inconsistent with the person he told people he was. Some of it was more than a little hard to believe. In one post, he tells the story of fleeing his postdoc studies, flying to Israel, joining some special forces unit, and engaging in a bloody firefight that left his buddy Jaacov lying in a contorted red mass on the ground, gone. In the aftermath, he describes how at night that event shakes me awake cold and shivering. Further, he says he could repent for what happened but to do so would lead to a false story and a false story is no story at all.

Make of those words what you will. Indeed, in hindsight, much of what he wrote becomes ironic in the most obvious of ways and even bleakly, blackly comic. For one, he saw no reason why, with the application of his superior mind, he couldnt live forever. As he wrote on his SurvivorMan blog: True indeed that no one has ever lived past one hundred thirty years, but nobody with my genes or diet or knowledge or supplement regimen or commitment or lifestyle has existed in the past thirteen billion years. Not one person identical to me ever. [And] since no one like me has ever existed, no one like me has ever died. By that reasoning, I must have a 100% chance of immortality! WOOHOO!

And then theres the small matter of love, which he seemed to be slaving over, in front of his computer. Hed tackled it once before, in a 375-page 2015 book he wrote (using his Jesse James alias) titled Psychology of Seduction: Seduce Women Using Evolutionary and Social Psychology, which is still available on Amazon and far better, much more comprehensive, and much less offensive than anything written by Neil Strauss or Erik Mystery von Markovik, the two best-known pick-up-artist authors. It also includes a self-test to see where you stand in terms of psychopathic malevolence. Even the most charitable of final tallies places him at the very darkest end of the scale. On the other hand, if you only count his known actions following his arrival in British Columbia, he comes off far better, mainly just as someone with a deep-seated need for constant attention.

More recently, it seems hed been working on developing a solution to the age-old problem of finding true love, his goal being to help mankind do away with satisficing, which is a fancy term for the cognitive heuristic of settling for the most adequate person who is reasonably available. He saw a future in which his end product artificially-intelligent virtual robots he called love bots could be programmed with all the desirable traits you hope to find in your soul mate, from the physical to the metaphysical and beyond, in order to alleviate the fruitless and time-consuming search for perfection in the real world. And heres the kicker: Since no one wants to pay for love, I will be making these love bots available free to the public once the programming is complete. Sometime later, he mentioned selling an unnamed something to an unnamed far-sighted company for an undisclosed sum. Could have been his love bot code or something else entirely. We may never know, since all that he owned and possessed went up in the blaze.

Before his death, he was a frequent poster on an anything-goes Facebook group called Squamish Climbing. Here, he spouted off as usual, but he also wrote, I personally would love to see more minorities in climbing. There is way too much ignorant white trash in this group.

He was particularly critical of a climbing outfitter called Arcteryx: It seems reasonable to accuse them of racism based on two undeniable points. There are tons of super strong minority climbers, far stronger than some of the assholes that Arcteryx sponsors 2. They simply choose NOT to sponsor one single minority climber, despite the abundance of such climbers. Instead, looking at their athletes page, they want young, buff white dudes and gals as the face of Arcteryx. For them it seems appearance even takes precedence over both climbing ability and personality. (Arcteryx has yet to respond to Rolling Stones request for comment.)

This brought forth some harsh words, but he didnt shrink away or take back his own. And then, in the first weeks after his death, climber after climber stepped forward to say nice things: I climbed with Jesse once and met him a few times over the years in Smoke Bluffs and he has always been generous. And: Jesse James passed away? How?? He was one of the first people to set up a top rope for me. Also, he walked the walk. He talked the talk. Goddamn! A good man!

His climbing pal Nicole Deuchar did tell me, Every time we went climbing, hed keep me safe. He was always tight. I mean, he was so psyched about rock climbing that it was contagious. People would say to me, Why do you go sit down and talk to him? You dont even like him. And I was always like, I kind of do, though.

Once he was identified as the former leader of a neo-Nazi outfit, however, most of the encomiums drifted away like so much rock dust. But even then, one climber peeked around the shadows to write: Whatever the outcome here was, this human was always beautifully polite, kind and totally a treat.

Read enough of this stuff and its hard not to lean sideways in the judges chair, maybe soften your stance and loosen up previously held high-and-mighty opinions, maybe not by a lot, but maybe just enough to briefly gaze upon him with a kind of wonder and not as a total psycho who only got what he deserved.

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Who Killed the Nazi on Campus? - Rolling Stone