Charlie Dawson, who tends bar at Rosewild in Fargo, will present an abstract on the behavior of particles in the universe at an international conference in Varna, Bulgaria, in September.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Charlie Dawson is a little different from the other thinkers invited to make presentations at the Minkowski Institute’s Seventh International Conference on the Nature and Ontology of Spacetime.
Speakers at the event – to be held in Vaarna, Bulgaria, Sept. 12-16 – include physicists, cosmologists and mathematicians from leading universities around the globe, from Austria and Australia to Israel, Japan, the United States and Yugoslavia … and, thanks to Fargo-Moorhead’s Awesome Foundation, a Fargo-Moorhead bartender named Charlie.
The Moorhead man submitted a scientific abstract to the institute in May. His paper explores the ontology of spacetime and the role of observership in the universe.
But a five-day trip to a scientific conference in Bulgaria was well beyond the reach of a man who has worked behind the bar in FM establishments for the past 10 years. When he received the rare invitation to the conference, Charlie says, he looked for ways to fund the pricey trip. “Friends suggested GoFundMe. But I felt bad about basically panhandling to raise the money,” he says. He tried selling artwork on IndieGoGo.com. Raising only a couple hundred dollars. Then an acquaintance mentioned the Awesome Foundation.
“We don’t usually fund travel,” foundation director Brandy Malarkey says. “But we thought it was pretty wild that a bartender from Moorhead was being invited to present at an international conference.” The privately funded group, which makes grants to “crazy, local ideas,” chose the cosmic-minded bartender for its monthly $1,000 award, bringing him closer to attending the international cosmology summit.
The directors of the prestigious intellectual conference may have been as surprised by Charlie’s submission as the foundation’s members were by his application. When the list of conference participants was published, he says, he was surprised to see his name followed by lofty acadeoc credentials – accolades belonging to an entirely different Charles Dawson, this one a PhD candidate in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I contacted the institute right away about correcting that,” the local Charlie reports. “They didn’t withdraw my invitation.”
Charlie’s premise and the field that so fascinate him are admittedly far beyond the understanding of most humans. Ontology can be described as the philosophy of physics, he says. According to the humanities website www.study.com, “ontology, at its simplest, is the study of existence. But it is much more than that, too. Ontology is also the study of how we determine if things exist or not, as well as the classification of existence. It attempts to take things that are abstract and establish that they are, in fact, real.”
This is not a subject that comes up often at Charlie’s full-time job behind the bar at Rosewild in downtown Fargo’s Jasper Hotel. But it encompasses cosmic questions about the universe and human consciousness, esoteric topics that have fascinated him for most of his life.
The Fargo South High 2002 graduate had just completed nine years as a U.S. Navy firefighter when he signed up for a community college astronomy course in Ft. Collins, Colorado. “That teacher blew my mind,” he remembers. At the end of the course, he wrote a19 page final paper on special relativity, the concept that space and time are the same thing. Immersing himself in the topic via Youtube, he was hooked. “I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I wanted to know more, more, more.”
More than a decade later, the self-educated 40-year-old has absorbed a universe of scientific knowledge and philosophical speculation. After returning to Moorhead, he took a few classes at Minnesota State University in two areas that fascinated him, majoring philosophy and music. “I wanted to insure I’d be a bartender forever,” he quips. Then, after his GI benefits ran out, he took his education off the campus and into his living room.
Charlie turned to the internet. He devoured Youtube videos by luminaries studying the philosophy of consciousness, complicated math concepts, and finally, the fermions and bozons at the very heart of all matter and energy and the oscillations of scrollwaves.
Is that clear to you? If you’d dived as deeply as Charlie into philosophy and cosmology, perhaps it would be. Otherwise, it tends to be moderately inscrutable.
He, however, spends most of his free time delving into the concepts and theories surrounding the physics of the universe through countless books and online lectures: “Steven Strogatz’ book ‘Sync’ got me started on all this,” he says. “PBS has a great channel called Spacetime. The Kahn Academy has courses on trigonometry and calculus. MIT and Stanford have all of their undergrad lectures and some graduate lectures online. They also have the syllabi, assignments, quizzes and tests posted.” He recommends the MIT course on quantum mechanics and Stanford’s and Stanford’s lectures on black hole cosmology.
“It’s amazing how easy it is to learn about whatever it is you want to learn about these days,” he points out. “I’m just a bartender who listens to weird books. Don’t tell the cool kids!”
The Minkowski Institute invitation is actually his second to a prestigious conference. His abstract on spacetime was also accepted by the Long Island Philosophical Society’s 2024 conference, which he attended at Malloy University in New York in April.
Since cosmic philosophy must coexist with the need to make a living, Charlie has worked behind the bar in half a dozen local establishments, among them Rhombus Guys, the Old Broadway, Wurst Bier Hall, the Crooked Pint and O’Kelly’s. He has been at Rosewild for the past two and one-half years.
Someday, he may write a book about his conclusions or use his interest in the metaphysics of the universe in some other way. “I’d like the opportunity to stop bartending for awhile,” he admits. But in the meantime, he observes, “There are worse ways to make a buck.”
The privately funded Awesome Foundation, whose motto is “funding the awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time,” has independent chapters on five continents. For more information on the Cass Clay chapter and its grants, go to www.AwesomeFoundation.org/en/chapters/cassclay or email cassclay@awesomefoundation.org.