About the Author

Timothy B. Higginson was born in Boston. He has lived and worked in several countries across Europe and North Africa, and in cities in the East, West and Midwest of the United States.

He follows in the footsteps of other itinerant authors (itinerant in geographical location and in careers), providing a range of vantage points that informs the comparative, long-horizon view at the heart of Inalienable Obligations and all that is reflected in this book.

He was educated in Brussels in the early 1960s, then near Washington, DC for elementary school, followed by high school outside of Boston, and then studied Government (with applied math/computer science) at Harvard College, and received his JD at the University of Chicago.

He spent his early (pre-law) career writing software for spacecraft in LA (including work for NASA, NOAA and commercial space programs), and for modeling energy markets for the International Energy Agency in Paris. He later became a lawyer, primarily representing clients on global technology transactions, for firms in Washington, DC and Chicago, and, later, acting as general counsel, including for a global tech firm based in Budapest, HU.

Having worked, in the early 1980s in LA, with the extraordinary engineers and scientists who build spacecraft that traveled to places such as Jupiter, and did things that have never been done before, he caught the bug of building things that never were. He holds a number of patent portfolios, with patents issued in the US, China and other countries. He founded a company in the early 2000s from a patent portfolio using a base-12 system to write any in any language natively and dynamically reconfigure to enter any type of command for any app/software (rather than the English alphabet-based QWERTY keyboard), that enabled, for instance, creating Chinese characters and Japanese Katana and Hiragana in an essentially infinite number of brushstroke-based fonts directly in Word documents, that also worked to create personalized, shareable “maps” of any type of content available through the Internet, and that fit in the form factor of a flip phone. He runs Clowd Foundry that currently holds patents in wind-powered technology, a Buckminster Fuller-style solution to replace plastic bottles, a new system for embedding, transmitting and receiving structured data in gravitational waves and is working on a new type of propulsion system based on time, rather than combustion.

He has developed a theory of emotional value-focused design — the conviction that the things we build should be answerable to the people who live with them at a deep emotional level, and, in doing so, these things will inevitably meet the more logical needs.

He has practiced as a studio artist for most of his life. He sculpts primarily in wood and pewter, and paints primarily in watercolor and sumi ink. His artwork reflects the song of his life, and the interplay of flickering light, shadows, shapes and colors that tell stories. His sculptures that transition between candles and vases (“vadles”) reflect his interest in interactive art: art that is co-created by the artist and the person living with the art, that changes with the season, the botanical arrangement, the hour of the day, that lives and breathes in the daily life of the person with the art. His pocket/tea sculptures are art that a person carries around with them all day, that accompany them as a friend, and set up wherever they are, a coffee shop, a friend’s place, a desk.

He is the author of A Trilogy of Fables, and writes essays on a wide range of topics.

Since early 2025, he has been writing and posting daily short, Tarot-illustrated plays in 3 Acts and a Chorus as the playwright of the Symbolic Sight Theater company. The plays are forming the “Scheherazade Cycle,” a riff on 1,001 Nights. All the plays are free, and can be accessed via www.symbolicsighttheater.com.

He has been fascinated by the twin conundrums of what is gravity and what is time since at least the mid 1990s. He published a thought experiment with a new theory of time in 2025 that is a key precursor and stepping stone to the thinking in this book. Chapter 6 is based on that essay. A key outcome of that thought experiment and a key precursor to Inalienable Obligations can be found at www.churchoftimeunited.com which offers a belief system anchored in an understanding of time as sacred and inherent in every being, and respecting all beings whether human or otherwise, and whether on earth or elsewhere.^[1]

He is committed to finding solutions to alleviate at least some aspects of the worst of climate change.

He currently lives near Boston. He has two, ever-astonishing grown daughters.

To learn more about the author, please visit www.timothybowditchhigginson.com

Notes

[1] See my essay on “What is a non-human, non-earth centric religion” at https://medium.com/@t.higginson/what-is-a-non-human-non-earth-centric-religion-986cd8da0e6f