From childhood, Blake Mincey wanted to know how the world works. He still doesn’t have all the answers, but at this point in his life, he has amassed enough life experience and academic training to feel as if he’s made some progress.
The 39-year-old Georgia native is set to graduate this spring with his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard College — decades after his search for answers to big questions began. His path has been interesting if not direct.
“As a kid, I wanted to know why things were the way they were,” he said. “And in high school, physics and chemistry really fascinated me, because I started finally getting real concrete answers for all this curiosity that I had.”
Mincey grew up in Adairsville, a small town in northern Georgia. He spent his high school career prodding teachers about electrons, protons, and neutrons. Impressed by his curiosity, a teacher bought him a copy of “The Elegant Universe” by theoretical physicist Brian Greene.
“Of course, I didn’t understand any of it at the time, but I found it fascinating. So it kicked off this thing where for the rest of my life, I would just read all of these different trade books by like Sean Carroll or Neil deGrasse Tyson, or just physics books written for the general population,” he said.
