Hello my name is Jack. I live in Mill Valley, California, a smug suburb just north of San Francisco. Staying inside was not an option in my house neither was watching television so I spent my childhood outdoors catching tadpoles and lizards, biking, playing tennis, surfing and skiing. The light pollution from San Francisco blocks out much of the night sky, as a result stargazing was limited to the constellations the Big Dipper and Orion. After freshman year I left home and went to Berkshire, a boarding school in western Massachusetts. The night sky above my school was far more brilliant than the one above my home in Mill Valley. I admired   the sky full of stars, galaxies and other celestial objects but frankly I had no idea what I was looking at.

I have been watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos on YouTube (these are two of my favorites:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxfJfv9tirU), which give me some sense of what is out there . But I am hoping this class will provide me with a solid understanding of the cosmos and thus further my understanding of life on Earth. During my junior year of high school I took a physics class and we learned about Newton’s Laws. I am excited to study these laws in the context of the entire universe rather than in mundane physics problems.

When I first learned about black holes, I was in 1st Grade and I freaked out thinking that we could, at any time, be sucked into one. The possibility for spontaneous obliteration kept me up some nights. Eventually my fears were quelled and  recently I read an article about black holes that peaked my interest in them again. I understand them at an incredibly basic level. They terrify me. They are completely abstract to me.  I want to learn about how they are formed and how they act on the universe around them. I know quantum mechanics is involved with black holes, which is another foreign topic to me but one that I also want to learn more about.