The Gory Personal Details

Family

Despite having lived all over the US (see the early years) and having a town in Pennsylvania named after him, Greg is at heart a Midwestern boy. His immediate family still lives there, with mother Patricia and sister Stacey in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area and sister Sarah just outside of Chicago. Greg would like to return to Minneapolis someday, assuming employment doesn't present a problem. In December 1995 he finally finished his doctorate, so that's no longer in the way; the fact that both sisters had already long since received theirs (J.D. and D.V.M., respectively) irritated him to no end for years:

Gosh, you wouldn't hardly guess that they're twins. Of course, our hero is way ahead in the family department:

Greg is happily married to Veronica, a California native. The union took place in Yosemite on an incredibly gorgeous spring day in 1993. The couple lives in Silicon Valley with the usual 2.4 kids (or thereabouts), both human and canine. (In fact, there have been two sets of the furry kids. The original set was Eiko the yellow Labrador Retriever and Crosby the Irish Water Spaniel, the latter of whom was particularly talented, having mastered the Levitating-Butt Trick long ago [see above]. They passed on to the great dog park in the sky and were replaced by Zack the wonder-pup and Nala the none-too-bright, both of the muttly persuasion.)

The humanoid kids are also quite the little bundles:

What cuties, eh?! (Of course, they've grown a little since then.)

Politics

Liberal. You betcha.

Philosophy

Ah ha ha ha ha ha! And he plays Doom, too, so there. (Well, he used to...nowadays, just keeping up with the PNG, MNG, and Info-ZIP web sites is almost more than he can manage.)

But seriously, Greg does in fact believe that physics can, in principle, (eventually) explain all measurable phenomena in the known universe, and maybe even a little more than that. We may not (do not!) have all the answers yet, but given enough time and money, we have the necessary tools (the scientific method) to get arbitrarily close. Note that this is a belief, so in a sense it's as "religious" as any theistic philosophy. On the other hand, there's lots of hard, physical evidence to support Greg's beliefs, including the 1995 discovery of a certain particle predicted by physical models of the universe, and the more recent discoveries of (many!) planets around other suns...

As for what is meant by "explain," Greg thinks of it in this way: the mathematical description of the universe known as "physics" may not actually describe how the universe "truly is" or how it came to be; but that's not the point. The point is that--modulo the stuff we don't yet understand--an arbitrary physicist armed with the Laws of Physics, the power to implement them in a new universe, and plenty of good reading material to pass the time while he waits around (several gigayears) could create a universe that is completely indistinguishable from our own in every conceivable detail. Of course, procuring funding for this little experiment might prove troublesome in the current economy.

(By the way, Greg is really way too busy to waste time arguing his philosophy with anyone. If you don't happen to agree with him, that's just fine. As far as he's concerned, this is all just an amusing gedanken experiment, the mental equivalent of paddling the pickle. No need to waste everyone's time arguing about it...)

Personality

Where does one begin? And, more to the point, does anyone really care? Well, no matter. As noted elsewhere, "weird" is probably fairly descriptive, and "geek" is a near certainty. On the other hand, Greg did manage to find someone with apparent intelligence and good taste who nonetheless chose to marry him (and he has the legal documents to prove it!). So he can't be all that bad. At least, he doesn't have a criminal record yet (although there's still time...).