I decided to study physics when I was sixteen. At that age, the world felt like a grand mechanical puzzle to be solved, not an experience to be lived or a meaning to be sought. My attention was absorbed entirely by ideas—pure ideas—and by the beauty of the universe as revealed through them. I was captivated not only by physics itself, but by the romanticism surrounding the pursuit of truth.

I remember many late nights, after everyone else was asleep, staring at the stars through my cramped dorm window, books scattered around me, sometimes until dawn. I was mesmerized by the elegance of the simple principles that move the universe—and by the miracle that the human mind could comprehend them at all. The lives of the great thinkers of science—their solitude, their fierce devotion to truth—seemed to me the highest calling. I even embraced a kind of youthful celibacy, believing that the pure pursuit of knowledge demanded such single-mindedness.

Now, at nearly thirty, I still love physics and still shudder at the wonder of the cosmos. I still delight in foundational questions and find meaning in the clarity and mystery physics offers.

But over the last decade, I have learned something equally important—something I never knew to factor into my decisions when I was younger.
I lack a sense of community.

By community, I don’t mean mere collaborators. I mean a shared communal experience—something that roots one’s pursuits in the broader human experience, in shared values and shared emotional life (at least in some form). A bureaucratic, transactional environment in which people work only to get paid does not count; there is no shared emotional investment, no common orientation toward meaning or purpose in such a setting.

When it comes to the pursuit of truth, this implies something crucial: I don’t want a life where I drift through symbols and equations during the day—treating them as job tasks, career milestones, or contributions to narrow dogmatic subfields without ever questioning authority—only to come home feeling entirely disconnected from it all.

I don’t want dual identities. I want to return home and feel a continuation of what I lived that morning—and to feel that continuity woven through the whole fabric of my life. I want both my workplace and my home to be emotionally charged, and charged in the same way—charged in the widest sense possible, with no inhibition or artificial barriers between different kinds of knowledge, different kinds of experiences, and different kinds of explorations.

I’m anti-professional—I hold responsibility, respect, and honesty sacred, but obedience pretending to be professionalism is a quiet kind of suffocation, and I refuse to suffocate.

Throughout my academic journey, I have had no collaborators and no intellectual companions with whom I could grow. The only enduring “community” I felt connected to was the lineage of great scientists of the past—people who inspired me but who are, of course, no longer alive.

Still, a few beautiful memories stand out. First, during my undergraduate years, I had a best friend with whom I bicycled through quiet nights, parking our bikes by a bench overlooking the highway as cars passed below and the moon shone in the distance. We would sit there for hours pondering grand questions—about death, black holes, the origin of the universe, the nature of time, and even about love.

Second, years later, I had another brief but luminous experience at a conference in Graz, Austria, surrounded by philosophers of science, where ideas, music, food, and conversation blended into something that felt like true community.

And finally, when I was a college student, I realized the sense of togetherness that emerges simply from being part of a class—a shared emotional resonance born from coursework struggles, socializing, joking about professors, and going on excursions. Even when classmates were not particularly passionate about the subject, there was still a genuine sense of community. People were paying to be there, not being paid, and many had not yet adopted a bureaucratic attitude toward learning. Importantly, there was no expectation of doing a “job” for someone else; academic effort was directed toward self-development.

But in the grand scheme of my past, there has been no lasting circle around me—no consistent environment of thinkers exploring big questions together. Only silence.

Perhaps this solitude was a curse particular to Albany rather than a reflection of academia as a whole. Then again, I may be wrong.

What I do know is that physics, as it exists today, no longer feels like the unified community it once was. The great schools of the early twentieth century—Copenhagen, Göttingen, Cambridge—have faded into history.

What remains now often feels fragmented into narrow, sometimes dogmatic subfields, without a shared philosophical foundation. I respect physics deeply, yet the sense of belonging I once imagined I would find within it never materialized—or exists only in tiny islands scattered and disconnected. “Physics” is no longer a single, unified “physics”—not merely different specializations, but different conceptions of what physics itself even is.

What still unites these communities under one word—‘physics’—is the shared canon of experimentally established laws, the sacred text that no one disputes. They also accept the same bar for admitting a model or result into this canon: rigorous logical consistency and experimental confirmation.

These two threads—the shared canon of experimentally established laws and the shared method of logical and empirical rigor—are what define science, and that is why science remains singular and that is why the science part of physics is still intact.

But physics is no longer singular in its social, cultural and existential dimensions. Each school or subculture within physics now carries its own “local sacred texts,” its own local practices, and its own local beliefs. Even within my field, foundations of physics, there are the Bohmians, Everettians, the Bohrians, the Qbists and so on. It’s like the great ship of physics capsized when politicians stormed the deck after World War II, lured by what physics could offer them— power and weapons. They bought their way into the captain’s cabin, and when the ship finally tipped, everyone scattered into different lifeboats, each heading in its own direction, somewhat lost.

It was not always this way. The physicists of the pre-war era seemed to share a more unified sense of what physics was, and they understood it as something wholesome, logical, humanistic, philosophical and ultimately as a way to organize our experiences of the world. Einstein belonged to reading groups that discussed ethics and Spinoza, and Newton wrote more on theology and prophecy than on physics.

In those earlier eras, what we now call physics was closer to natural philosophy—emotionally alive, intellectually expansive, and intertwined with questions of meaning. The transformation began when physics became entangled with national interests, especially through the development of nuclear weapons. Militarization reshaped the field into something more technical, bureaucratic, and emotionally sterile.

If physics had never contributed to nuclear weapons or national power—and had never captured the interest of politicians—it would likely have remained emotionally similar to the humanities today (the lucky humanities people!). History offers parallels: when Rome absorbed Greek philosophy, it reframed it in utilitarian terms, emphasizing law, engineering, and governance over the Pythagorean, Aristotelean, Platonic or the Socratic spirit. This shift did not single-handedly “cause” the Dark Ages, but it did mark a broader cultural turn away from wonder and toward utility—away from philosophical inquiry and toward state-oriented pragmatism.

In a similar way, physics lost much of its earlier humanistic spirit when it became aligned with political power, funding systems, and national priorities. Everything beautiful gets distorted when politics is involved—that’s partly why I’m an anarchist, but I digress.

There have been many recent headlines along the lines of "Physics is dead.” But physics does not die when it fails to make new discoveries, as those headlines suggest. Physics dies only when it loses a shared sense of what it means to do physics at all—when it loses a unified purpose, a shared emotional orientation, and a living community grounded in that purpose. If physics is “dead,” it is in this deeper sense, not because scientific progress has slowed.

It took me many years to realize that community is not an optional accessory to a meaningful life. It is part of what makes thinking sustainable, joyful, and human. At seventeen, I could not see this. At twenty-nine, after learning to think but also experiencing disappointment, isolation, and disillusionment in the social realities of academia, I finally began to understand community as a central need rather than a luxury.

This realization has left me feeling untethered at times. When I look around at people my age, I often see two broad categories: those who have settled into jobs and family life with minimal community beyond necessity, and those who are deeply embedded in artistic or intellectual circles—musicians with bands, philosophers with seminar groups, filmmakers with crews.

Meanwhile, I stand somewhere in between: I possess knowledge and the capacity to think, but I belong to no living, breathing community of practice.

I do not expect a tenure-track job, nor do I care about prestige. My purpose in engaging with science is the joy and meaning it brings. Since physics offers the joy but not the community, I feel compelled to attempt a kind of patchwork—to seek community elsewhere and engage with science purely for the pleasure of it, more like Faraday or Heaviside. Of course, this also means I must meaningfully contribute to whatever community I join, not simply warm myself at its social fire.

So now, at this juncture, the real question I face is no longer “Which subject interests me?” but rather: Where can I build a community? Where can I be part of something meaningful, where the ideas I care about are welcomed and where I can contribute something of value?

This question is broad and open-ended, especially given my wide range of interests. In an ideal world, I can imagine myself joining many different kinds of communities. I could pick up a guitar and find a home in music. I could study acting and enter the world of theatre. I could join an activist circle and become an advocate for a cause. I could devote myself to fiction and literature. I could even imagine becoming a farmer and finding community in a life close to the land.

I believe in human potential—my own included—and I feel, in some sense, unconstrained by the specific form my future community might take.

But life is short. Time is limited. And I must begin with what I already possess: physics, philosophy, and an interest in moral and analytical reasoning. These offer a starting point, even if the possibilities beyond them remain open.

My parents do not fully understand this inner landscape—neither my emotional experience nor my intellectual evolution. To them, the conflicts I have had with advisors and senior researchers appear simply as “broken relationships.” From their perspective, I look like someone who “failed in physics,” who “made bad choices,” who “wasted time,” and who should now take a job and marry a recommended girl.

I understand that their advice comes from concern, but it does not recognize where I am coming from or what I am seeking. If I’m Saturn, my mother sees me as a distant point of light—just another dot in a crowded sky. My father can see a little better, maybe even see my rings, like someone with binoculars, but still cannot see my inner world fully.

I have always felt the itch to create something—to think freely, to live freely, to ask big questions.
And I want a community of others who value the same. I want community as much as I want intellectual freedom.

I used to believe the pursuit of truth required solitude. Now I know that truth is only half the story. The other half is the people with whom we share the search—people with the right ears. And I want that—community—as much as I want freedom and thought itself.