Adam Becker

And I read a lot of pop physics books and

And they said some confusing things.

And in particular, they talked about two theories that said really wild and strange things about the world.

One of them was Einstein's relativity and the other one was quantum physics.

And, you know, really, really weird things in both of those theories.

But it turns out relativity doesn't require more than like early high school math, right?

You don't need calculus.

You don't even need pre-calculus.

It's just geometry and algebra.

And so I learned relativity in high school and I thought, oh, all that weird stuff seems a lot less weird now.

I bet when I get to college and I learn quantum physics, that's going to seem less weird too.

That is not what happened.

Yeah, no, so instead I got to college and I started learning quantum physics and it didn't get better, it got worse.

Oh no.

And so I was in this class where the professor was talking about one of the weird things in quantum physics.

I don't remember exactly what, because it was a long time ago, but he was saying something about how when you're not looking at things, you can't talk about what's going on, but then when you look, things change.

And I probably asked something like, okay, but what do you mean by looking?

What does that mean?

And we kind of got into it.

And I don't remember exactly how the fight went down, but I just remember that at the end, he said in this like really haughty, disdainful voice, he said, well, if that's the kind of question that you're interested in, then why don't you go to the philosophy department?