Beginnings

I have to admit that I find this a daunting task, mainly because I don't know who you are (assuming you exist). Generally writers have the luxury of a bit more information about who their readers are likely to be. It's like being a teacher on the first day of class and walking into a room filled with a random selection of students from all grade levels. How do I talk to them about physics? So I apologize in advance for those times that I talk over your head or under your feet. I will try to be both interesting and accessible as far as possible. And finally, as almost goes without saying, I will be writing on behalf of myself. So while I remain quite aware that I reflect on my employer, you should note that I do not speak for it.
There's the beginning of my blog and now to move on to my beginning in physics. As do most children, I went through several career aspirations in my grade school years. Nuclear physics was my career of choice starting in middle school after I read Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time. I read it because I had to meet a requirement to read a certain number of pages for my English class. How that book came to me I still don't know, though I might guess that I got it from my brother, who was also always kind enough to teach me math that I wasn't supposed to know yet.
-=sidebar=-
Any number to the zero power is 1, no matter what your third grade math teacher says. If she tries to get you to recant, just stick it out like Galileo and suffer missed recess.
-=end sidebar=-
I admit it's a bit puzzling how a book that is really about cosmology, particle physics, and relativity would make me start going about wanting to be a nuclear physicist, but this is the best I can remember it.
Once I got into high school however, I became more practical and decided engineering was the way to go. This seemed like the tried and true career path for those interested in math and science, and Georgia Tech (a.k.a. Tech), in my then home state of Georgia, was a great school for engineering. My financial situation wasn't so rosy though, so instead of doing four years at Tech, I opted for a dual-degree program in Physics and Engineering with my first three years at North Georgia College and the last two at Tech.
As I got into my physics courses in earnest and got involved in the research being conducted by the professors in my department (some low-energy experimental nuclear astrophysics), I became more and more convinced that my future was to be in Nuclear Physics. This was reinforced by my participation in the REU (research experience for undergraduates) program at Duke University and TUNL (the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory) in the summer of 2001. I also got stuck on mathematics a bit. The purity and beauty of mathematics were just too attractive to my modernist mentality to be resisted. I'm still struck by the fact that somehow I never had trouble staying awake when I had a proofs assignment on my mind. All through the night I would sit in front of the whiteboard in the hall outside my room, filling and refilling it with those logical puzzles. In the end I finished up after five years at what had then been renamed North Georgia College and State University with a double major in Physics and Mathematics. The next stop was graduate school, but perhaps that's enough for now and with so little physics content :(
I'll put up some physics soon, I promise.