I began, somewhere in my forth year of grad school, when I was finally exposed to the current cutting edge of physics, to believe that the whole construct of modern physics, while great at advancing technology, maybe wasn’t so great at answering those fundamental questions.
Physics, during the early 1900s, had gone from using math to construct toy models of the known physical world, to forcing reality to agree to the math. From letting reality drive the math, to letting math drive reality.
I wanted to understand the universe at a level that when I try to explain it to someone at a McDonald’s, I’m not laughed at. Or not reported to the cops as an escaped inmate. Not because I think normies have a lock on what’s true, but that I think the truth shouldn’t be so odd that it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Or, to put it another way, the truth is a very human thing, and it shouldn’t be instinctively off putting to other humans.
I also began to think a little differently about religion that last year of grad school, not as a route to the truth, but as a low bar that science hadn’t managed to clear, provoking my physicist friends over beers by telling them that the Big Bang was only Genesis dressed up in fancy Math. Something I more firmly believe now.
There was a sense in the air that we were approaching a nirvana on earth, the payoff for centuries of scientific and rational thought. We had found the correct mixture of free markets, good governance, and smart technology, all available because of a dedication to a lucid intellectualism unchained to emotion. The 90s was a combination coming out victory dance for the technocratic class, and we were cocky, including me.
I want to emphasize what might seem obvious — which is how deeply money matters to many financial people. Yet it’s deeper than bankers craving money, it’s their entire identity. It’s how they see themselves in the world, and how they understand their worth as a person. It becomes their morality — a very explicit metric by which they measure how good they are. A free-market libertarian telos, adjudicated down to the single dollar.