Dad

He grew up wanting to be a general. The son of an army officer, he moved from school to school with his father's postings and spent his boyhood on make-believe battlefields, reading about Napoleon rather than magnets and batteries. He planned two years of engineering at UP and then the Philippine Military Academy. Relativity got to him first, and studying it cost him the eyesight the academy required.

Roger's doctoral thesis took on one of the oldest problems in general relativity: how Einstein's equations themselves dictate the way a body moves. In Newton's physics you need one law for how masses make gravity and a second law for how things move. In Einstein's theory the first law already contains the second, but turning that into usable equations is hard.

Think of a boat on a still lake. Even without seeing the shore, you could tell how it moved from the ripples it leaves: they crowd together ahead of it and spread apart behind. Working with Ezra Newman, Roger did something like that with light. He treated a particle as a singularity in the gravitational field and read its motion from the light cones spreading out from its path, instead of measuring it against a fixed grid.

Two results stood out. The particle turned out to have an internal structure of its own. And for a charged particle, the equations produced the Lorentz–Dirac equation, including the small backward push a charge feels when it gives off light, without the extra assumptions that derivation usually needs.

He defended it on April 2, 1970, at 25, after doing much of the work as a guest at King's College London, and it became three papers with Newman in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review and the Journal of Mathematical Physics. The animations are pictures of the ideas, not of his mathematics.

Roger did not think a scientist could be neutral. In his view, refusing to take sides only meant your work would end up serving whoever already held power, so he chose the side of the people and organized other scientists to do the same. The Samahan ng Makabayang Siyentipiko took science out of the laboratory: to the barrios, to the oil-price hearings, and to the barricades of the Diliman Commune.

Martial law made that a crime. He spent most of the 1970s underground, and when the military caught him in January 1976 they tortured him and held him for two years and nine months without ever filing charges, first in a safe house, then at Bicutan and Camp Crame.

The world's physicists would not let him disappear. Letters reached Marcos from Caltech, Oxford, Brussels, Pavia, Bern, Waterloo and Pittsburgh, and from the president of the American Physical Society. Amnesty International took up his case, physics conferences passed resolutions in his name, and Physics Today was still asking its readers to write to Malacañang in 1978. Inside, he kept teaching, guiding a student's thesis through the prison walls. He was released in October 1978 and went straight back to work at the same university.

On Sunday, January 25, 1976, Malaysia's New Sunday Times ran a United Press International dispatch from Manila under the headline “Two top Reds held in Manila swoops.” It passed on the Marcos government's version. The Department of National Defense said it had captured Jose Luneta and the journalist Saturnino Ocampo, and that it had earlier

captured Roger Posadas, a former physics professor identified as head of the CPP's explosives arm and a suspect in a series of bombings in Manila before martial law was proclaimed.

He was never charged with any of it.

In February 2005 The Manila Times retold the arrests from the claims that martial-law victims had filed for compensation. It called him the “only Filipino expert in the relativity theory of Albert Einstein,” and noted that a 1971 subversion charge against him had been dismissed for lack of evidence. Intelligence agents took him on January 12, 1976, and held him at a safe house of the Philippine Constabulary's 5th Constabulary Security Unit. According to a report by the Task Force Detainees of the Philippines included in the claims, the detainees were held incommunicado for more than a month and subjected to “pistol whipping, body punches, kicks and electric shocks.” The article names Rodolfo Aguinaldo, then a Constabulary lieutenant, as one of the officers who interrogated and beat him. Only after 70 days was he moved to a regular detention center. Francisco Nemenzo Jr., dean of UP's College of Arts and Sciences, appealed to Marcos to free him and the chemist Ester Albano-Garcia, calling them “internationally-recognized” in their fields.

That December, while he was still in detention, the Eighth Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics met in Boston. An Associated Press report, carried by New Hampshire's Nashua Telegraph on December 15, said the participants approved by voice vote, “without audible dissent,” a resolution that would

note with regret the absence of our colleague Dr Roger Posadas from our meeting

It asked that he be “enabled” to attend the next international relativity conference, in Waterloo, Ontario, the following August. That was GR8, whose program chair, Werner Israel, wrote to him in 1977 (his letter is among the documents above). Material handed out with the resolution said he was “in custody at a military camp” under Philippine martial law.

A second resolution asked the Soviet government to let all of its invited scientists attend. A Soviet astronomer, Leonid Grishchuk, objected to the pairing: “there is no suggestion the Soviet scientists are in jail.” One of the organizers of the Soviet resolution was Peter Bergmann, the physicist who had trained Roger's own doctoral adviser.

When he came back, physics at UP was hollowed out; in 1982 the department lost nearly all of its Ph.D.s to jobs abroad. He rebuilt it by giving people reasons to stay: the country's first doctoral program in physics, a five-year bachelor's with a real thesis, laboratories that could do experimental work, and links with universities in Japan. That department became the National Institute of Physics. Then he did the same for the sciences as a whole, carving the College of Science out of Arts and Sciences in 1982, more than doubling its Ph.D. faculty, and raising the buildings that began the UP Science Complex.

If I had the power, I would lay a simple stone in his name in one remote corner of that magnificent Complex in recognition of the power of his vision.

He never stopped fighting in public. He wrote an indictment of the government's science board under Marcos, led petitions against a science secretary, called out a deuterium hoax as a swindle, argued for teaching physics in Filipino, and spent his last decades on technonationalism: the idea that the Philippines could catch up only by building its own technological capabilities, as South Korea and Taiwan had. He kept saying Filipinos were as capable as anyone of mastering science.

He could be blunt about national pride. Speaking to Philippine Navy officers in 2012, he took aim at a national icon:

Another glaring example of Philippine technological weakness is the jeepney, which some Filipinos like to claim as the embodiment of Filipino ingenuity but which to me exemplifies Filipino inability to achieve self-reliance in designing and manufacturing an internal combustion engine – a hundred-year old technology that Koreans, Malaysians, and Chinese have learned to design and produce on their own.

Reporters kept calling him a nuclear physicist, and he kept correcting them: relativity. His colleagues remember a perfectionist who seemed aloof but was fair, who loved coffee and singing, and who served drinks at his parties but never drank.

Believe it or not, Roger was as serious about singing as he was serious about UP.

In August 1987, Cesar Escosa, who called himself a scientific investigator-researcher (he turned out to be an accountant), announced that the Philippine Deep, the ocean trench off Surigao, held the world's largest deposit of deuterium. Extracted and sold, he said, it would pay off the country's foreign debt, employ 350,000 Filipinos and make the Philippines one of the richest countries in the world. Congressmen took him seriously. Rep. Mario Ty of Surigao del Sur filed a House resolution on it, and Rep. Glenda Ecleo filed a bill to create a Philippine Deuterium Development Authority.

No such deposit exists. Deuterium is found in all water, spread almost evenly through the oceans, and it cannot pool at the bottom of a trench. When the House committees on energy and natural resources took up the claim in a joint hearing in March 1988, with Escosa there to defend it, a group of UP scientists came to debunk it. Roger, then dean of the UP College of Science, did not soften his words. He called Escosa a “pseudo-scientific swindler.”

He explained the science, too. Marine geochemists had found that surface water near the equator is, if anything, slightly richer in deuterium, because ordinary water evaporates more easily than heavy water. Whatever deuterium the North Equatorial Current carries to the Pacific east of the Philippines, the return currents simply carry back. Escosa's deposit, he said, was an “oceanographic hallucination,” and deuterium as a fuel for cars had not been shown to be safe or economical. The UP group also faulted the Department of Science and Technology for staying silent, as if it could not tell scientific fact from fiction.

For Roger, the bigger problem was not one man. Highly educated citizens and even top government officials, he said, were easily duped by “pseudo-scientific miracle peddlers,” and the affair was

a gauge of our country's extremely unscientific culture and strong proclivity towards reliance on miracles as solutions to our national problems. … We are a nation of “miraculizers” who would rather pray and search for miracles than invest money and effort in national scientific and technological development.

The House did not let go. Four days later the paper reported that Ty and Rep. Alawaddin Bandon of Tawi-Tawi had filed House Bill 4292 to find out “the truth or the falsity” of Escosa's report, with Ty warning that it would be “the highest form of disservice to our people” if Congress did not. Roger called it “deuterium delirium”: the report had no scientific basis, and the claim was “contrary to actual analysis of trenches and actual measurements of deuterium abundances in the oceans.” Later that year the government's own Office of Energy Affairs agreed that “scientific facts make it impossible for deuterium deposits to be lodged in the Philippine Deep.” Ty's resolution and Ecleo's bill died in committee.

The myth outlived the hearing. In 1989 another congressman accused Escosa of charging some 10,000 applicants fees for forms and notarization. Imelda Marcos took up the cause in the late 1990s, and the story still circulates online, where fact-checkers have had to debunk it again.

During National Language Week in August 1988, UP's Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature held a symposium on Filipino as an instrument of national liberation, Ang Wikang Filipino Bilang Instrumento ng Pambansang Pagpapalaya. In the Manila Standard a week later, the writer S.V. Epistola reported that Roger, as dean of the College of Science, “said flatly”:

Ang patuloy na paggamit ng Ingles ang pinakamalaking balakid sa pagsulong ng agham sa ating bayan.

That is: the continued use of English is the biggest obstacle to the advance of science in our country. The college's biggest departments had already decided in favor of teaching physics, chemistry and mathematics in Filipino. To the old objection that Filipino could not handle the sciences, his answer was practical: “Ang atom sa Ingles ay atom din sa Filipino,” an atom in English is an atom in Filipino too, and “manghihiram tayo kahit saan”: we will borrow from anywhere to make the shift easier.

On September 17, 1989, Calixto Chikiamco, the Manila Standard's general manager, gave his “Political Economy” column, “To ride which ‘wave’?,” to what he called the Wave Debate among UP's scientists. Borrowing Alvin Toffler's three waves of civilization (agricultural, industrial and post-industrial), he named Roger the most prominent of a group arguing that the Philippines should “leapfrog” into selected Third Wave technologies such as biotechnology, industrial lasers and fiber optics. To Roger, the old quarrel between developing the countryside and building heavy industry was “ludicrous” for that reason.

Chikiamco laid out the case: Third Wave technologies saved capital, did not demand the destruction of natural resources, and were already eroding the cheap-labor advantage that countries like the Philippines relied on. He gave the skeptics' side too: without Second Wave industries such as steel and chemicals, mastering the Third would be very hard. Both camps agreed the country had to raise research spending from 0.1 percent of GNP to 1 percent. What he could not forgive was that politicians ignored the debate for gun smuggling, gambling and land scams. He signed off:

Poor Roger! Poor scientists! Poor Philippines!

The same year, Roger and Celso Roque set out the strategy in “Toward a leapfrogging strategy for national self-reliance in science and technology.”

As chancellor he twice stood between the National Bureau of Investigation and his students. In December 1994, four days after a UP student was killed in a fraternity rumble, NBI agents led by Orlando Dizon, chief of the bureau's Special Operations Group, came to the campus to arrest two students without a warrant. Roger, Vice-Chancellor Rosario Torres-Yu and university lawyer Marichu Lambino stopped them. The Ombudsman then charged the three with obstruction of justice. In 2000 the Supreme Court ruled that the attempted arrest was illegal, that the officials “had a right to prevent the arrest,” and ordered the case against them dismissed.

Three months after the rumble, the NBI was back in the news. On March 30, 1995, the Manila Standard reported that Roger had publicly denounced NBI agents who mauled an 18-year-old UP philosophy student and held him incommunicado. The student's jeepney had collided with the car of the same Orlando Dizon on March 17; when he tried to calm Dizon's driver, the driver punched him, other agents joined in, and he was taken to NBI headquarters on Taft Avenue, where, Roger said, he “was further subjected to physical and mental assault.” The student filed charges of attempted murder and illegal detention; the NBI had filed assault charges against him.

On Friday, July 22, 1994, at the UP Theater, UP President Emil Q. Javier invested Roger as the fifth Chancellor of UP Diliman. For the occasion the Office of the Chancellor published a commemorative book of more than a hundred pages, Pagtatalaga kay Dr. Roger Posadas bilang Ika-limang Chanselor ng Unibersidad ng Pilipinas Diliman (“The Investiture of Dr. Roger Posadas as the Fifth Chancellor of the University of the Philippines Diliman”), produced by the UP Diliman Information Office. It holds a biography in Filipino by Dean Rogelio Sicat, the full program of the ceremony, his inaugural address in English and Filipino, messages from every sector of the university, essays about him, and greetings from universities, government offices and international agencies around the world. It is the source for much of the timeline above, including the date of his release.

The ceremony itself ran in Filipino: honors from the UP ROTC unit and band, the entrance of the flags, the national anthem, a welcome dance by the UP Filipiniana Dance Group, messages from five representatives of the university, a song by the UP Staff Chorale, the investiture, his address, and U.P. Naming Mahal, the university hymn.

His inaugural address

He framed his term around two milestones: the centennial of the 1896 Revolution that gave birth to the Filipino nation, and the year 2000, which he saw, after Alvin Toffler, as the gateway to a knowledge-based “Third Wave” civilization. Measured against both, he said, the country had fallen behind:

Our first 100 years as a nation have been a century of cultural deterioration and technological stagnation.

The Philippines, he pointed out, had “not even mastered some of the most basic technologies of the 19th century such as steel making, chemical production and machine tool making,” while its East Asian neighbors industrialized by mastering Western technology and keeping their own cultures. His answer was the slogan of his term, “Nationalistic Culture, Futuristic Technology”: UP Diliman should become the spearhead of both.

In practice that meant reviving general education as the heart of undergraduate study, adding a course on ethics and social responsibility, shifting undergraduate teaching from English to Filipino while strengthening the English department, building a 30-hectare Arts and Culture Complex, and drafting “U.P. Diliman 2008,” a plan running to the university's centennial. By October 1996 he promised a computerized, networked campus, modernized laboratories and libraries, and the start of a Technology Park and an Engineering Complex.

He closed with appeals. To the faculty, “underpaid and overworked” and expected to produce world-class work “with third-class facilities,” he asked for a culture of research and creativity. To the students, he asked them to “breathe life to the activism that once gave this campus the distinction of being the vanguard of the nationalistic commitment and idealism” UP was known for.

What others wrote

Jose Magpantay's profile of him in the Philippine Graphic, reprinted in the book, remembers his first class in June 1970: third-year physics majors waiting for a 25-year-old Pittsburgh Ph.D. who was, as they saw it, “a descendant—professionally, that is—of Albert Einstein.” No Filipino had published on Einstein's theory before him. It also recalls that the Samahan ng Makabayang Siyentipiko once raised funds by screening a racy “bomba” film, Sabrina, in Abelardo Hall, “a fund-raising success.”

Ester Garcia, arrested in the same sweep in 1976 and by then a commissioner of higher education, wrote that he sacrificed his own research career to build physics in the country. Former chancellor Emerlinda Roman credited his ten years as dean with making the College of Science a national center of excellence. Danilo Yanga, whose master's thesis Roger supervised from prison and who became dean of the college after him, admitted that people found Roger aloof because he seldom smiled, and that the two of them had fought hard over the college's direction, but always made up.

Student regent Dennis Cunanan wrote that students first knew him as the Diliman Commune activist famous for his molotovs, and hoped he would stay a radical activist as chancellor. Senate President Edgardo Angara called his loyalty to UP “unquestionable,” and Antonio Carpio, then the President's chief legal counsel, sent his greetings too. Arnold Molina Azurin traced his slogan back to José Rizal's “The Philippines a Century Hence” and heard in it echoes of Claro M. Recto and Renato Constantino.

Azurin's article in the Philippine Free Press, also reprinted in the book, has Roger explaining why the slogan mattered:

All these years our manufacturing levels have remained at the operative level. We know how to run the imported machinery, but we have yet to learn how to design them and make our own machines.

Among the letters from abroad is one from Chang-Lin Tien, then Chancellor of UC Berkeley, where I study now. Many foreign greetings called Roger the “fourth” chancellor; the editors added a note that he was the fifth.

A vision for the University of the Philippines, 2016

In August 2016, at 71, he was a nominee for president of the University of the Philippines. His vision statement, “Transforming the University of the Philippines into a Truly Great National University,” started from the 2008 law that made UP the national university and argued that UP had not yet lived up to it. He spelled out what it would take as an acrostic, TRULY GREAT.

Nuclear power and national industrialization

He spent his last years arguing that the Philippines could meet its Paris Agreement commitments and still industrialize only by going nuclear: recommissioning the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant and building new reactors, including small modular ones, across Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. On September 6, 2016, he sent Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi a first draft of a national nuclear energy policy. Its vision was a Philippine nuclear industry able to design and build its own reactors, not just buy them.

Before he turned to nuclear power, he made the same argument for solar and wind. In December 2015 he and the Australian scholar John A. Mathews wrote in the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

In a country with such abundance of renewable energy from the sun, the wind and the earth, it is madness to keep importing fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, and to delay the inevitable shift to renewables that is already under way.

What mattered most to him was who would build the technology. Importing foreign-made turbines and panels, they warned, would only trade one dependence for another: imported fuel for imported equipment.

In a short note on the Bataan plant, he pictured it as the hub of an agro-industrial cluster in Bataan, Subic and Zambales, supplying cheap power, industrial heat and desalinated water, with a dedicated university and research institutes growing around it into a “Nucleopolis, a la Silicon Valley.”

A longer essay, “Why our country must go nuclear to comply with the Paris Agreement and achieve national industrialization,” is not posted, because his working draft quotes long passages from other authors' articles.