I remember Star Trek and rushing home every day after school to see it. I remember Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and Bones and Lt. Uhura and Scotty. I remember the song at the beginning and the sound of the ship zipping by. I remember wanting to be like Mr. Spock and wanting to become a physicist, just like him, and maybe one day being chief science officer on a starship. Maybe even commander. And I remember asking my science teacher in high school about starships and I remember her laughing and saying that I might not live to see one, let alone live on one, and I remember being so mad that I vowed to build one one day. I remember beginning to design a matter/antimatter reactor and finding out that I needed to learn calculus, then finding out that I didn’t know enough trig to study calculus yet. I remember deciding to invent teleportation instead.

I remember reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and wanting to live in a hole in the ground with a perfect round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. I wanted to smoke a pipe that was larger than me and talk to wizards and elves and travel around and slay dragons and wargs and hobgoblins and trolls. Perhaps ride on a giant eagle. I remember being disappointed to find out that J.R.R. Tolkien died before he could finish the Silmarillion. I remember he lived overseas.

I remember studying Einstein’s theory of relativity and I remember reading on my own about time/space and Maxwell’s equations and quantum dynamics and black holes and time/ space warps and white dwarves and neutron stars and supernovas. I remember the equation N = Rfneflfel and working out the equation again and again to see how many populated planets there probably were in the galaxy if-this-were-true or if-that-were-true. I remember never knowing if I was working the equations correctly.