Ralph D. Hermansen

Hi! I am Ralph D Hermansen, who in the last decade decided to become an author as my second career. I worked for 40 years as an aerospace engineer and retired in 1998. My wife, Janet, and I moved to the small, rural town of Lake Isabella, CA to escape the hustle bustle of city life. Nestled in the southern Sierra mountains, we enjoy the beauty of nature every day. Of the things I wanted to do in retirement, I accomplished one of my bucket list items by writing "Polymeric Thermosetting Compounds" in 2015. It tells the story behind several of my patented inventions while working as a Senior Scientist at Hughes Aircraft Company. The next book I got published is titled "Becoming: Our Origins, Our Evolution, and Our Emergence as an Intelligent Species". I had long wanted to become a scientific non-fiction writer and this book is the result of over ten years of research. It tells what science has discovered about the universe, the solar system, life on earth, human evolution, and our progression as an intelligent species. It even looks into the future and predicts where we may be headed.The book is written for a wide audience and should be suitable for the average curious reader. Concurrently, I had been working on "Down from the Trees" and got it published a few months after "Becoming". It focuses on human evolution and is written to be a textbook for an Anthropology course. Using the triad of fossils, evolutionary theory and DNA evidence, the transition from ape to modern human is explained in detail The book is now available from Apple Academic Press and from Amazon.com. In August 2020, I published "Humans, Part Animal and Part God". This book explores the question "what is a human?" Are we a divine creation or an evolved animal? How did we come to be so powerful as a species and are we capable of controlling the power at our fingertips?