About the Author

For more than fifteen years I have kept the digital systems of a group of companies running: servers, websites, hotel software, and the networks that monitor heating and cooling installations across Greece. The job is simple to describe. Something fails, and you find out why.

I studied computer engineering at the University of Patras. I was raised by a carpenter and a seamstress, people who trusted what they could touch. Both habits stayed with me: trust what can be measured, and distrust a story that arrives too neatly.

Then some things did not fit. In a quiet room, during a Chi Gong exercise, my palm filled with heat. It came back every time I did the exercise correctly, and not when I did it wrong. Years earlier, in my teens, an allergy that had twice put me in emergency care stopped after a treatment that, on the chemistry, should have done nothing. I know the usual explanations and I do not reject them. But “placebo” is a label, not an explanation. I did what I do with any fault I cannot reproduce on demand. I filed it, and kept the file open.

The file kept growing. The Learning Earth is what I built to hold it: one frame in which what the old traditions recorded under names like chi, prana and pneuma, and what modern biology, physics and neuroscience now measure, can be read together. It is a reading, not a proof. In every chapter I mark the point where the evidence ends and my interpretation begins.

I do not know most things, and neither does anyone else. I find that the most interesting fact available. The edge of what is known is where I like to work.

I wrote this book with extensive help from large language models, and I say so in its pages. The research, the drafting and the redrafting went faster for it. The decisions about what to argue, what to leave open and where to draw the line are mine, and so are the mistakes.

Away from the desk I ride long distances by bike, race enduro, and walk in the mountains, from Mount Taygetus above Kalamata to Annapurna Base Camp. I read widely, science fiction included.

Get in touch

If you want to argue with the book, I would like to hear where. Write to me at hello [at] thelearningearth [dot] com, or join the list and reply to the first message when it arrives.