Ted Jacobson grew up with a love of mathematics, and plenty of wonder but no knowledge of how things work. A fan of mathematical science fiction, in middle school he built an unfolded four-dimensional hypercube out of LEGO pieces after reading Heinlein's story, "And He Built A Crooked House". The puzzle of the deeper structure of the apparently "ordinary" is what grabs him. High school physics was an exhilarating revelation of the secrets of nature, and he's been hooked ever since. He is now Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, and the target of his research is to understand the quantum nature of space and time.