I've lived in New England my entire life, and if there's one thing that Yankees treasure, it's tradition. I'm no different, and yet today, I grudgingly decided that one tradition is not worth keeping.

Ever since I was a child, my family engaged in one of the most time-honored New England traditions of the autumn: raking leaves. Raking leaves is a noble chore.

546When I was ten years old, my world fell apart in 73 seconds. It was the first time I witnessed the death of another human being, and the raw pain of that day still has not left me.The year was 1986, and I was in third grade. My family had just moved to New Hampshire two months earlier, and I was amazed to see another New Hampshire resident, Christa McAuliffe, all over the evening news, in addition to Channel 9, the local news station. It was the dream of a little boy to reach for the stars, to go to space and look down upon the earth. I dreamed about it.

The universe is expanding away from the origin of the Big Bang. This has been measured and quantified. Looking through space in the direction of the Big Bang is like looking back in time, in the same way that looking at stars is like looking back in time, since it takes billions of years for that light to get to us. What we see today is not what is currently happening.

Now, it has been theorized that one cannot travel faster than light. The speed of light may be a constant that cannot be broken.