Whenever they re on the same commuter rail train, David Hill, right, meets Blair Wong on the platform at Back Bay station and walks him to Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
In high school back in the 1970s, Blair Wong recalls he often had trouble staying awake during physics class, but one day was different: the day he learned how light passes through a lens. Blair became obsessed with understanding how a transparent curve could focus light.
“I didn’t really care for the other chapters in my physics textbook in high school,” Blair says, “but I read the optics chapter probably about 20 times.”