The senior partner didn’t waste any time. ‘I’m sorry, Zahaan,’ he said, ‘your services are no longer required at the firm.’ We sometimes called him the Burger King behind his back, because he ate a Whopper Meal at his desk every day. I’d never spoken to him before, and now I never would again.
It was the summer of 2001. I was fresh out of university and nine months into my first job as a management consultant in London. My parents had allowed me to move back into my old room, where I routinely collapsed after getting home from the office well after midnight. Professional life was punishing, but I gave it my all. For a brief time, I felt like I was flying: at my first performance review, I was told I had ‘partner potential’.
But then I got a phone call, telling me that one of the senior American partners wanted to meet me. That was unusual; but then again, I’d been working so hard and getting such good feedback, I figured it couldn’t be anything too bad. I was directed to an office on the first floor, several levels below where I usually sat.
After he fired me, my ears buzzed and my chest tightened; I don’t remember much else, except being told that I shouldn’t even return to my desk. It became apparent that the location of the meeting had been chosen because it would allow me to take a single flight of stairs down to the ground floor. No one would need to see me, and I wouldn’t need to speak to anyone.
The decision felt cruel and unfair. But more than anything, it seemed to violate the laws that for many years had been my way of making sense of the world: the laws of physics. Cause and effect, action and reaction. What followed was an unlikely journey – one in which the equations I thought I’d left behind at university became, unexpectedly, a companion through the messiest parts of life.
Before work, before university, I attended a competitive and prestigious all-boys school in London. While I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunities my education afforded me, life still felt tough for me as a lonely and anxious teenager. The school’s social currency was confidence, quick comebacks, and an effortless cool I never quite mastered. I often felt like I was watching from the edges, trying to decode the rules of a game that everyone else grasped intuitively.
The only thing that got me through was physics. The most fundamental of the sciences, physics represented a world that was perfectly ordered. It offered structure, rules and predictability. There was no social speculation; I could just work hard and try to figure things out. Problems and solutions, equations and outcomes. It didn’t matter how popular I was – what mattered was whether I understood the system. Slowly, the chaos of the world developed a sense of form and structure.
That clarity stayed with me, through school and into university. I read physics at Oxford, convinced for a long time that I wanted to become a scientist. It wasn’t always easy; there were late nights, bitter struggles with problem sets, moments I wondered if I’d ever get it. But when it clicked, it was wonderful: entropy, quantum mechanics, cosmology, all those deep, strange laws that govern the Universe. Physics seemed like it had a purpose, and I thought we’d go the distance.
But at some point in my final year at university, things started to change. Physics still fascinated me, but I found myself drawn to other subjects too – politics, economics, business. I wanted to understand not just how the Universe worked, but how people did. So after graduating, I decided to leave physics behind and see where those other interests would take me.
For the first time in years, physics seems to be at the heart of the cultural zeitgeist
As it turns out, when I stepped away from physics, many others did too. In the years after I left university at the turn of the millennium, physics began to fade from view in the English classroom. In 2006, physics A-level entries (post-16 qualifications in the UK) were down 37 per cent from where they were in 1991. The absolute numbers have since rebounded – but not for everyone. Today, the gender gap remains stark: only 23 per cent of A-level physics entries in 2026 came from girls, a figure that hasn’t budged much in decades. And more than half of GCSE physics classes in England (taken by 14- to 16-year-olds) are taught by a non-specialist, with a shortage of some 3,500 physics teachers nationally.
Research looking at why students choose or reject physics has found that it’s seen as abstract, difficult, and disconnected from real life – a perception that’s remained steady, even as enrolment has recovered. Meanwhile, newer fields – computer science, behavioural economics, even data journalism – have felt more immediate, more applicable. They speak the language of now.
What’s strange is that this perception problem has happened at the same historical moment in which physics has begun popping up in other surprising places.
Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind Brexit and later Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, gave physics a fair share of the credit for the success of his campaigns. In one of his highly popular newsletters, he paraphrased the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman: ‘The most important thing is not to fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.’ Then there’s Elon Musk, who credits the success of his many business ventures to physics and ‘first-principles thinking’: discard convention, start from fundamental truths. And for decades, the legendary investor Charlie Munger made the same case in finance, saying that the ‘logic and power’ of physics had helped him enormously.
For the first time in years, physics seems to be at the heart of the cultural zeitgeist, praised by public figures whose decisions affect millions of lives. But look closer, and the picture is more complicated.
In the first instance, billionaires and political operatives make for awkward ambassadors; Cummings, Musk and Munger might be brilliant, but they’re also extremely divisive. But more than who they are, what interests me is how they’re putting physics to work – whether they’re truly thinking with the discipline, or just brandishing it for rhetorical effect. Is ‘physics’ simply a shorthand for cutting through complexity, for stripping down problems to their most basic parts? Or does it genuinely offer something distinctive that other sciences and ways of thinking cannot?
Philosophers call the first approach ‘reductionism’: the idea that if you break any system into small enough components and trace them far enough, you eventually arrive at physics. That view can be powerful, and explains why so many people find it attractive.
It’s also been spectacularly successful. When 19th-century physicists showed that heat was simply the motion of atoms – that temperature, seemingly its own phenomenon, was actually just particles bouncing faster – an entire science collapsed into physics. Years later, that same approach helped particle physicists break matter into smaller and smaller pieces until arriving at something apparently irreducible. From the reductionist instinct came quarks, leptons and the Higgs boson. Their catalogue blueprint, the Standard Model, remains one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history.
But reductionism has its limits. Take politics: a radical reductionist might say that this too comes down to physics, because politics is about the behaviour of groups of people; groups are made of individual people; people are made of atoms; atoms are governed by physics. But does this mean that we could predict the outcome of, say, a national election by studying the behaviour of individual atoms inside the brains of every registered voter? Unlikely. Putting aside issues of practicality, what would be the point? Economists already have economics. Psychologists already have psychology. Politicians have political theory. Physics has value only if it’s additive and illuminating.
For me, the real value of physics had never been as a cudgel for smashing things up into their smallest bits, but as a framework for navigating systems – for recognising patterns, probing assumptions, and testing whether the models we rely on actually work as they’re meant to. We see this way of thinking throughout the history of science. When cholera swept through Soho in 1854, the physician John Snow didn’t know its cause. But he mapped the cases, identified the pattern, and traced the outbreak to a single water pump on Broad Street. The founder of what we now know as epidemiology, Snow worked by constructing and interrogating mental models of the world, probing their assumptions, and following the data wherever they led.
Map from Report on the Cholera Outbreak in the Parish of St James, Westminster, During the Autumn of 1854 by John Snow. Cholera cases are represented by black rectangles, with clusters of cases indicated by stacked rectangles. The contaminated water pump is marked in green, while surrounding water pumps are marked in red. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection, London/colour annotations by Aeon
The question, then, is not simply whether physics can be borrowed as rhetoric, but whether it really helps us to see the world more clearly, in ways that complement and benefit other disciplines. That, at least, was what stayed with me after I stopped studying it formally. Not equations or textbooks, but a way of thinking that I found myself reaching for when my world was falling apart.
Getting fired was one of those moments. I had worked so hard, yet somehow I’d still failed. Everything I understood about cause and effect told me this shouldn’t have happened. But here I was, after months of working flat out, with nothing to show for it.
An infinitesimally small shift in starting positions for the three objects can throw the whole system off balance
While some might have turned to therapy or career counselling, I turned back to physics to try to move on. The immediate cause was clear enough. The dot-com bubble had burst, sending ripples across the global economy that eventually reached my desk. Belts tightened, and the harsh rule in such circumstances tends to be last in, first out.
The dot-com bust was not the first nor last time something like this would happen. In 2008 came the subprime mortgage crisis; in 2011, the eurozone crashed; in 2013, the rupee tanked; in 2015, there was turbulence on the Chinese stock market; and in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic. All these crises had two things in common. First, almost no one saw them coming – at least not precisely when or where or how. Second, they weren’t triggered by some enormous dramatic collapse, but by small, seemingly innocuous failures that cascaded into something far larger. For example, it just took a few small incidents that might otherwise have passed unnoticed – like the failure of a local mortgage lender in Southern California – to precipitate the subprime mortgage crisis.
All these events are examples of what physicists might call chaotic systems – deterministic in theory, but in practice so sensitive to initial conditions that tiny variations can spiral into radically different outcomes. A well-known example is the ‘three-body problem’, popularised by Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel of the same name and a 2024 Netflix adaptation. If you have two planets orbiting each other, you can write down neat equations to predict their paths forever. But add a third planet, and suddenly the maths explodes into unpredictability. The three bodies are still governed by clear laws, but an infinitesimally small shift in starting positions for the three objects can throw the whole system off balance.
The mathematician Edward Lorenz discovered something similar in 1961 when running weather simulations. His first attempt entered starting values rounded to six decimal places. His second try was rounded only to three. Yet the results diverged so dramatically that he initially suspected it was a computer fault. In fact, tiny differences in initial conditions had cascaded into entirely different weather systems. The atmosphere, like the economy, like a career, was deterministic in principle and unpredictable in practice.
As a young graduate, I had been living without surge capacity. In truth, most of us do
Understanding the crash was one thing, but physics also helped me think about what came next. I had believed that inputs led to proportional outcomes; logically, in that world, the way to get ahead was to work as hard as possible. But physics teaches that chaotic systems play by different rules. They call instead for surge capacity, an extra buffer that allows them to absorb shocks. Without it, even small failures can lead to total collapse.
Think of a power grid. Most of the time it hums along without problem. But during an unexpected surge, such as a heatwave when millions of air conditioners are switched on at once, the system can overload and shut down. To prevent this, engineers design grids with slack in the system and extra capacity to handle unexpected spikes. Without it, a minor disruption can cascade into a blackout.
That was my mistake. As a young graduate, I had been living without surge capacity. In truth, most of us do. We optimise everything from our schedules to our to-do lists – convinced that if we just push a bit harder, we’ll be fine. But the more we operate at our limits, the more fragile we become.
Physics provides a different lesson. Rather than relentlessly maximising, resilience is about building the capacity to withstand outlier events when they come. That might mean time slack, leaving space in our lives to recover rather than scheduling every minute. It might mean career slack, developing new skills, side projects and networks, rather than relying on a single path. Surge capacity might not prevent a crisis, but it sure helps survive one.
After my brief and bruising spell in consulting, I joined the civil service and spent most of the rest of my 20s working in government. I loved the sense of purpose, the colleagues and the privilege of shaping policy. Yet, if I’m honest, I still carried a small canker of resentment and jealousy towards my former consulting colleagues.
Compared with the UK national average, I know I was paid well as a civil servant. But with friends on six-figure salaries, it felt like I was failing at something. They could afford nicer clothes, cars and apartments. And then there was the magic trick of turning money into more money by buying assets, further widening the gap between their bank balances and mine. What stung wasn’t the inequality itself, but the perceived unfairness of the circumstances. I felt like I’d worked just as hard and still fallen behind. That distinction between inequality and unfairness became important to me.
Psychologists have shown that we’re wired to make this distinction from a very young age. In one Yale study, children were asked to split 10 coins between two people based on their performance on a task. When the two people performed equally, the children split the coins five-five – equal and fair. When one person did better, the children split the coins six-four – unequal but still fair. The interesting result happened when the children were told that both people had performed equally, but they now had to split 11 coins. With no way to maintain fairness, what could the children do? They decided to simply throw away one coin. Time and again, the children prioritised fairness.
People will accept a world where some have more, so long as they believe the game isn’t rigged
This distinction is also evident in physics. Inequality, in the literal sense of unevenness, is built into the fabric of the Universe. In the very beginning, the cosmos was smooth and equal, a uniform fog. Only when tiny imperfections appeared – quantum fluctuations that allowed matter to clump in some places more than others – did galaxies, stars and planets emerge. Without that inequality, there would have been no structure, no possibility of life. In that sense, inequality is not always a flaw. Sometimes it is the condition for growth and diversity.
We see the same principle in natural systems. Rivers branch into unequal tributaries. Lungs and blood vessels evolve into networks with a few large arteries feeding many smaller ones. That inequality of size isn’t corruption or greed, but a kind of efficiency. It allows flow. Yet when the flow is blocked, like when a river silts up or a vessel clogs, the system fails. The problem, in other words, is not inequality itself, but unfairness: the obstruction of flow, the stacking of rules, the blocking of opportunity.
I think this is true in human systems, too. A society where some are richer than others may be tolerable, even healthy, so long as opportunities and resources can still move freely. But a society where opportunity is blocked, where the rules are stacked, where unfairness rules – people reject that instinctively. Just as I did when I looked at my friends’ consulting careers and wondered why I’d been cast out. Physics, then, suggests that a lack of justice is the real problem, rather than inequality per se. People will accept a world where some have more, so long as they believe the game isn’t rigged.
Suddenly I saw this dynamic about fairness everywhere I looked. The financial crisis of 2007-08 wasn’t just about banks making risky bets, but about the perception that ordinary people paid the price while bankers walked away with bonuses intact. The eurozone crisis wasn’t just about debt, but about southern European countries being squeezed by rules they hadn’t set. The Occupy protests, the Arab Spring, Brexit, Donald Trump – all, in their different ways, were rebellions against unfairness.
Looking at the world through a physicist’s lens, these moments resemble phase transitions. You can heat water gradually and nothing seems to change – until you reach a critical threshold, a boiling point, and suddenly the whole system transforms from liquid to gas. Human societies, too, can bear strain for a while. But once unfairness feels systemic, the pressure builds until the system flips.
Small wonder, then, that in an age of tumult and transition, physics has found new admirers – especially among those who want to catalyse radical change, for better or worse. Musk speaks of first principles, Cummings of complexity. Their examples show how the tools of physics can shape thinking far beyond the laboratory. But in their hands, physics can feel more like a weapon than a framework, a way of bulldozing nuance in the name of clarity. For the rest of us, the challenge is not simply to borrow the garb and glamour of physics, but to carry forward its mindset – one that values humility as much as boldness, and curiosity as much as certainty.
That, I think, is where physics can still make its greatest contribution. Not by giving us ready-made answers or comforting illusions of inevitability, but by training us to question ourselves and live with the resulting uncertainty. Public discourse is saturated with physics, yet we need a deeper grounding in what it really teaches us about how to ask better questions, to test our own blind spots, and to admit what we don’t know. That need feels more urgent as new technologies only increase the temptation to reach for shortcuts.
We need artists who understand systems, scientists who can tell stories, leaders who can hold both
So what would it take to embed this shift? My journey with physics began when I was a teenager, and that’s where I believe we need to start now. Too often, we present physics to young people as dry and technical. We teach them equations but not frameworks, facts without wonder. We rarely tell them that physics can help with the messiest parts of life, bound up as they are with uncertainty, resilience, decision-making.
In the UK, we make things worse by forcing students to choose just three or four subjects to study for the final two years of school. In practice, this often forces a split between being on the ‘science’ track or the ‘arts’ track. That false binary deprives us of exactly the kind of multidisciplinary thinkers we need: artists who understand systems, scientists who can tell stories, leaders who can hold both.
When I visit schools now, I try to show physics as a kind of superpower. I want young people to feel that physics is something they can use, not something that excludes them. More than anything, I want them to feel it’s theirs.
I started this essay as a young man being shown the door by a superior. I ended it somewhere else entirely, with physics as a way of making sense of the messiest parts of life. But, really, what I’ve been edging up to is a story about how certain hardwon habits of mind can help us find meaning in the messiness and unpredictability of reality. For those of us who are not professional scientists, maybe the real task isn’t to love physics uncritically, or wield it carelessly, but to use it wisely. Physics shouldn’t be a shortcut to rock-solid certainty, so much as a way to live more humanely without it.