I grew up fascinated by space and science. I remember having a John Glenn Mercury sweat shirt in the first grade and watching Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott in Gemini VIII on the old B&W TV. Actually what sticks in my head the most is the voice of the commentator (Walter Cronkite maybe?) as they made their emergency reentry. I attended the third best science and math high school in North Carolina (Tuscola Sr High class of 77 go Mounties!), earned a BS in Physics (minor in Math) from Western Carolina University (class of 82 go Cats!) and an MS in Physics from East Carolina University (class of 85 go Pirates!). All the physics I know was known by 1926. That is, I had Quantum Mechanics up to Schrödinger's equation but not the Dirac equation, which came in 1928.

I have spent most of the past 25 years working in the space launch business. The first 15 years on the operations side at the Cape and this past 10 years in software development. I also took off a couple of years to help build Landsat 7, which some of you may remember went splash somewhere between Vandenberg AFB and Alaska going the long way around. I helped launch Cassini and got an award for that. I worked on the Shuttle return to flight after Columbia and got an award for that too. I wrote part of the real-time computer program now supporting launches at the Cape. Lately I have been working on pre-flight analysis software used at the Cape, VAFB, Wallops, and Edwards/Dryden. All good stuff and all classical physics.

I have been trying to keep my head into current physics by reading popular science books. Those make for fun breakfast table reading but I’m frustrated by the huge gap between the popular books and the primary sources. There are a few million of us who had at least college calculus but who did not have... well physics beyond 1926. There are very few books that fit in that gap.

BTW, Tuscola was determined by experiment to be the third best math and science school in North Carolina in 1977. We took third place in the state wide competition behind the School of Math and Science and Chapel Hill High School. None of that was my doing but I was blessed to have attended a really good school with a group of really good teachers.