VIDEOWe were at Fly Bar. Agent Coulson and I had done a run at Kezar, then met up with Reed to plan our next Tahoe trip.
The plans finalized, we started chatting about girls from our past, work, and how – each of our jobs being so different – we'd ended up where we are given what we were good at in school.
I admitted to being a huge nerd who read the dictionary, and started bragging about punking my AP teachers for sucking at their jobs. But after two beers I got cocky and offered Reed a free demo of what a smart ass I could be: We'd all whipped out OkC on our phones, talking about girls, and I offered some corrections on the grammar in his profile. He was so grateful.
Reed and Coulson were pretty good at school too, they said, just the Left Brain stuff to my Right Brain stuff, until they got to particle phsyics .
"Yeah, so I'm in physics," said Coulson, "And the professor says, 'This is the equation for how an atom moves through a wall.' Then I raise my hand: 'How do we know?' And the answer is we just do. Some guy derived it, it works."
"Yeah, that's it," Reed nodded. "With relativity, there's no way to conceptually understand it. You just do the math, and the math just works. There you go: relativity."
That's when I shut my mouth , and just sat there, humbled by it: an idea so big, so complex, you can only understand it through the language of math. And while I was dicking around with vocab, Reed and Coulson were actually crunching those numbers.
"There was one problem where everybody in the physics department earned their stripes," said Reed. "You had to derive Shrödinger's Equation. My year? Two people got it."
I'd never heard of Shrödinger's Equation (his cat , yes, but not any of his math). So I looked it up on Wikipedia:
Solutions to Schrödinger's equation describe not only molecular, atomic, and subatomic systems, but also macroscopic systems, and possibly even the whole universe.[1]
Pretty damn humbling.