THE PERSON BEHIND THE QUESTIONS
Ricardo Maldonado.
Writer self-taught independent researcher
Born in Guadalajara and raised in Las Vegas, Ricardo writes about the questions that have stayed with him since childhood: why we are here, what we can know, and what might have come before the universe we observe.
Read Ricardo’s story
MY STORY
01 / THE BEGINNINGA question before I had the words.
I was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, and moved with my family to Las Vegas when I was five. Las Vegas became home—the setting for nearly every memory that shaped the person and writer I would become.
By seven, sleep had stopped being simple. I would lie awake thinking about infinity, existence, and the universe above me. I did not yet know words such as cosmology or spacetime. I only knew that reality felt impossibly large, that I was inside it, and that the questions would not leave me alone.
Why are we here? Why is there something instead of nothing? What, if anything, came before the universe we observe?
Where I first carried the questions.
Because I was raised Catholic, the first place I carried those questions was to God. Faith was woven into daily life. I attended Mass, served as an altar boy, sang in the choir, and spent much of my childhood within the Church. That world taught me reverence, service, and the belief that a life should mean something.
At nineteen, I turned that desire to serve into my first major publishing project. I launched and published Una Voz en el Desierto—A Voice in the Desert—a Spanish-language Catholic magazine in Las Vegas. I learned by doing: writing, finding advertisers, managing deadlines, working with printers, and building something I hoped could help people.
Over time, my beliefs changed. The transition was gradual, but the questions outlived the answers I had inherited. What remained was wonder—and a growing respect for science’s willingness to say, “We do not know yet,” while continuing to look.
Learning outside the institution.
My study of the universe did not follow a traditional academic path. I spent years teaching myself through books, lectures, public research, technical literature, and the work of scientists who made difficult ideas accessible beyond their institutions. Astronomy, cosmology, astrophysics, black holes, the Big Bang, and the foundations of physics filled the hours in which the old questions returned.
MOMENTS ALONG THE WAY
A question that stayed.
- Age 5
Moves with his family from Guadalajara to Las Vegas.
- Age 19
Launches Una Voz en el Desierto in Las Vegas.
- February 18–19, 2019
Writes down an idea about the early universe, then shares its first public trace.
The night the idea took shape.
On February 18, 2019, while lying awake, I began thinking again about the Big Bang and the possibility that our observable universe might not be the whole geometric story. A picture formed: what if the hot early universe was not the absolute beginning, but the local aftermath of a violent event in a larger-dimensional setting?
I sat up and wrote the idea on an envelope so I would not lose it. On February 19, I shared its first public trace. That sequence matters as personal history, not as scientific evidence. It was not proof, revelation, or discovery. It was the beginning of a mechanism-shaped question.
See the first public traceMake the question testable.
GOD PLAYS DICE™ follows the path from that lifelong question to a proposed explanation for the early universe. The book combines memoir, plain-language science, philosophy, and an examination of observations that might support, weaken, or rule out the idea.
The proposed higher-dimensional blast remains a working hypothesis. It has not been confirmed as the cause of the Big Bang. Ricardo keeps dated research versions, corrections, open questions, and failed checks in a public record. That record lets readers inspect the work; it does not amount to peer review or validation.
Explore the public research record
I believe curiosity belongs to everyone. Scientific conclusions, however, must be earned through evidence, criticism, reproducibility, and specialist scrutiny.
My goal is not to ask readers to believe an idea because it matters deeply to me. My goal is to make the question clear enough to examine and the proposal specific enough to challenge. If it fails, the failure should remain visible. If part of it survives, it should be tested again.
THE STORY CONTINUES
Wonder, evidence, and uncertainty.
“I do not know where the question will ultimately lead. I only know that it never left me—and that the most honest way to honor it is to keep wonder, evidence, and uncertainty visibly distinct.”