When I was a kid I loved space and the sky. What kid doesn’t? I remember having my mind blown by a book that showed all the NASA rockets lined up by height. The Saturn V, the space shuttle, and about 10 other smaller rockets that I can’t remember anymore.

The pictures in the book had a sort of bright 90s photo quality that I remember. I loved planes and I especially loved jets and rockets. The faster the better. The Blue Angels, Top Gun, all that fighter pilot bravado— my kid brain ate it all up.

And I liked building things and learning out their construction. The speed, the sound, the bright colors and the fire and the adventure. I wasn’t as interested much in the actual science behind these machines, or with the skill required to operate them. I just was in love with the machinery itself.

My aviator uncle had a phrase for this — “Twist and turn, crash and burn.” He wasn’t a scientist, or even a pilot. He was a mechanic, and he was in love with the technology, not the theory behind it.

We got along well.

Eventually I graduated from the earthly to the heavenly. From the planes on the ground and in the sky to the abstract. My interests shifted from the atmosphere to outer space. I watched the Cosmos with Carl Sagan and had my mind blown again, but this time it wasn’t by the thrust of rocket fuel nozzles and afterburners. Instead I was dwarfed by the immensity of the universe and the limits of human understanding.

I went to school and I studied physics in college. It’s a fascinating subject.

Did you know that time actually slows down when you go really fast? It’s called time dilation— the faster you move, the slower time passes. It’s significant enough that if you’re orbiting in the space station, time actually moves slightly slower than on earth. So astronauts are a couple seconds younger than us earthlongs. This sounds like science fiction, but it is fact. GPS satellites rely on it. If it weren’t true, GPSs wouldn’t work.

I learned about radioactivity and gravitation, cosmology electromagnetism, dynamics, and optics. I felt the thrill of pure understanding and of abstract thoughts. It didn’t matter if I would ever use any of it. This is the height of human rationality and human achievement, I thought. We all seek to understand the world around us.