A valued community member, Professor of Biophysics, Dr. Otto H. Schmitt, for many years a University of Minnesota faculty member, technology inventor and splendid teacher of biology and ethics, has died January 5, 1998 in Roseville, Minnesota.

Otto Schmitt has been an honest, ambitious, yet humble, a courageous and loving private and public person of infinite inherent human worth. Through his previously deceased wife of more than half a century, Viola, Otto understands each ethical person, whether man or woman, is not less than, but rather is independent and inherently equal in human worth to the whole of humankind. Thus, he has understood that the proper part of humankind, the private person, is under the governance of ethical as well as physical laws; that virtue is its own reward; that virtue is not a burden, but a challenge to expand to the full circle of the universe and to have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.

Professor Otto Schmitt will be well remembered for his many inventions and teaching accomplishments, including his having been among the first as yet few authentic scientists and moralists, supporting the reciprocal system of physical and metaphysical theory and practice, originated by the deceased engineer and author of Beyond Space and Time, Dewey B. Larson.

According to Mr. Larson, the structure of the physical universe as a whole is entirely finite and, in particular, motion and space-time are identical and quantised or finitely divisible, rather than unrelated and continuous.

According to Mr. Larson, the physical universe exists to make possible life of humankind, animals, and plants. Humankind is not a mere incident or accident of the physical. Human life requires the material and cosmic sectors, the two physical sectors of our existence, in which to develop and grow young bodies and minds. In this contingency we remain under the governance of the laws of physics, but this is not all. Our end is not in the physical. Human existence also inhabits a Third Non-Physical Sector Beyond Space and Time. The infinite soul and human spirit of each private person is under the governance of a moral code, whose laws it is the business of the science of ethics to explore and discover.

It appears evident to us because it is evidently true, as professed by our 1776 Declaration by the representatives of the United States of America in general Congress assembled, that all private persons, whether woman or man, are designed infinite, independent and inherently equal in death. Nothing so natural, universal and necessary as human death can possibly have been designed as an evil by Nature's God, S{he}.