I’m a physicist, a dedicated advocate of renewable energy, and a musician/digital artist. My wife Janice and I have lived in the “Northeast Kingdom” of Vermont, which is basically the northeast of the northeast of the Northeast, not counting Maine! We deeply love the charming and wild beauty of our state. We also live very close to Quebec, which definitely has the best croissants, and a lot of other great things. Professionally, I design and analyze proposals for commercial scale solar systems with Buffalo Solar Solutions Inc, an awesome company located in the Buffalo New York area.

Until joining the solar industry full time, I taught physics for fifteen years Vermont State University (formerly called Northern Vermont University, and Lyndon State College before that), covering classical physics through relativity and quantum mechanics, electricity & electronics, acoustics & psychocoustics, and energy science/renewable energy. I hold undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in Physics, and a B.S. in Sound Recording Technology from the Tönmeister program at SUNY Fredonia. Prior to teaching at VSTU, I was a research physicist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos Laboratory (1993-2007), where I pursued research in nonlinear physics and renewable energy technology. During that time I also led the New Mexico Solar Energy Association and the New Mexico Coalition for Clean Affordable Energy, and have been active with various other nonprofits in Vermont (Northwoods Stewardship Center, Energize Vermont!, local Unitarian churches). I presently serve on the Board (currently as chair) of the American Solar Energy Society, and continue to advocate in general for a complete and properly implemented transition to renewable energy.

My musical background is varied, but very strongly focused on both improvisation and composition. I studied classical piano in my young years under the late Janet Henkel of Clarence New York, and played trumpet in band, I was also fortunate in the 1970s through the 1990s to have spent endless hours improvising music in several bands with friends, enabled by the fact that my father, synthesizer designer David A. Luce, ensured that we had some instruments to play. We played a variety of progressive rock, popular rock, and sometimes jazz music, sometimes to the distress of neighbors who were subjected at a distance to the thunderous sound emanating from barn we practiced in.

The bands I played in performed a great many structured pieces as well, but crucially, we constantly improvised, often in the midst of an otherwise structured song, and especially with our own compositions, as these were more open-ended, and often had evolved themselves from improvisation. Our spirit of improvisation had two important roots: The improvisational traditions in general of jazz and rock of course, the latter still be strong in the 1970s at least, especially with bands such as the Grateful Dead, and secondly, the fact that we were mainly simply interested in exploring the enjoying our music. We dreamed a little about commercial success, but all in all we spent little time pursuing the practical actions required for that, opting instead to just keep playing. More recently we’ve resumed playing together again, and formed a new band called Sonic Vortex.

Lastly, I truly grew up in the milieu of Moog Music Inc., a fantastic company that rocked the world with the synthesizers it created. I can still smell the pervasive odor of solder, and hear the sounds of synthesizers being tested. It was a special time and place to be a young musician: