He has been an active participant with the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

He attended Mirabeau B Lamar High School in Houston, and graduated with a BA in physics from Rice University in 1957.

[4] In addition to his approximately 300 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals,[5] John Cramer writes a regular column, "The Alternate View", appearing in every second issue, for Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine.

[7] Cramer describes the sound as "rather like a large jet plane 100 feet off the ground flying over your house in the middle of the night."

Cramer has published three novels, Twistor (1989), Einstein's Bridge (1997) and Fermi's Question (2023), all within the hard science fiction genre.