Thomas Kearny (d. 2047) was a physicist who initially developed, along with Takayoshi Fuchida, the theory of hyperdimensional motion within subatomic particles and further theorized the possibility for teleportation of matter between two points in space.
Thomas Kearny, an applied physicist and nuclear engineer, was working on the the California Research/Design Team (CRDT), a multi-university think tank in association with Stanford University, in 2014, when he first met Takayoshi Fuchida, a world-renowned professor of theoretical mathematics from Kyoto University, whom he had looked forward to meeting. He and Fuchida teamed up, in a relationship that developed quickly, to work on resolving problems that existed in the team's fusion reactor development program. After four years of work, the CRDT solved all the technical problems with the reactor and had it running by June 2018, at which time a team from Harvard and MIT took it over.
The next month, Kearny and Fuchida discovered, while reviewing reactor logs, that it had not been performing according to accepted theories of physics. They began a series of unauthorized experiments using the university's "quarkatron" accelerator in the nuclear physics laboratory. These experiments suggested to the pair that mass could exceed the speed of light when exposed to a specific energy state, but no existing reactors could provide the necessary power to validate their hypothesis. In September, they chose to publish an objective report of their observations of hyper-dimensional motion within subatomic particles ("What Happened to the Universe When Einstein Wasn't Looking") in the fall issue of Western Alliance Journal of Theoretical Physics. The responses received were minor but scornful.
Additional papers would follow ("Einstein's Theories: The Cooked and the Raw" in 2019 and "Now What?", which would become their most famous paper, in 2020), becoming more aggressively critical of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and hypothesizing about the ability to teleport objects between two points in space, both of which returned even more ridicule. In 2021, they published "Pan-Dimensionality"; scientific feedback was humorously dismissive, focusing on the basis that the hypothesis was built upon theories that ran contrary to the widely accepted Einsteinian ones. This paper led the pair to losing their jobs and credibility. Finally, in 2022, the pair published a number of papers that discussed, in an obscure section, the creation of artificial jump points with the necessary equations, a precursor to experimentation started in 2615 that led to hyperpulse communications. 
Their previously-strong reputations rapidly morphed into those of scientific screwballs, to the point that the credit for the fusion reactor fell to the finalization efforts of the Harvard/MIT team, instead of the primary CRDT, and to General Motors, which first patented the design. By 2024, both scientists had their academic credentials revoked.
Following the loss of his ability to recover his profession, Thomas Kearny began work as a cook.
On September 3, 2107, following the successful test of the Deimos Project's experimental JumpShip, the pair of scientists would be publicly vindicated, as noted by a relayed broadcast from the destination nadir point 7 AUs from Sol's southern pole: "Kearny and Fuchida should have lived to see the day."
While ridiculed and humiliated during their lifetimes, at some point after the science was proven in Project Deimos the decision was made to honor Kearny and Fuchida by naming the technology in question after them. To this day, Jumpship FTL engines are known as Kearny-Fuchida Drive or K/F drives for short, ensuring that both their names and the debt mankind owes to them, will never be forgotten.
Thomas Kearny co-published a series of papers with Takayoshi Fuchida:
- 2018 - "What Happened to the Universe When Einstein Wasn't Looking" - published in The Western Alliance Journal of Theoretical Physics
- 2019 - "Einstein's Theories: The Cooked and the Raw"
- 2020 - Now What?
- 2021 - Pan-Dimensionality
- On page 9 of DropShips and JumpShips in the "ComStar Intelligence Summary" section, the following statement is made: "As the first reports were coming back from the Mars missions in January 2018, two scientists at Stanford University had begun to publish a series of papers on the existence of hyperdimensional motion within subatomic particles." On the surface, it appears that the first of Kearny & Fuchida's papers was published in January of 2018. However, it wasn't until July, after the fusion reactor was running, that the pair noticed the inconsistencies in the reactor's logs and it is mentioned that their paper "What Happened to the Universe When Einstein Wasn't Looking" was published in the "September" (The Star League, p. 9, "Timeline: 2014 - 2027") or "Fall" (House Kurita (The Draconis Combine), p. 9, "Kearny And Fuchida") issue of Western Alliance Journal of Theoretical Physics. It was decided that the reference to January in DropShips and JumpShips, based upon the statement "had begun to publish", meant that the reactor's logs first started recording the hyperdimensional motion on which the Kearny & Fuchida papers would be based. The final decision, however, is left up to the reader.
- DropShips and JumpShips (ComStar Intelligence Summary), pp. 6-7 (pp. 10-11 PDF), "Rise of the Western Alliance"
- House Kurita (The Draconis Combine), p. 9, "Kearny And Fuchida"
- The Star League, p. 9, "Timeline: 2014 - 2027"
- The Star League, p. 54, "Economic and Scientific Advances"
- ''DropShips and JumpShips (ComStar Intelligence Summary), pp. 9-10 (pp. 11-12 PDF), "Vindication of Kearny and Fuchida"