Alongside the engineering I do for a living, I'm a lifelong amateur student of physics. I'm drawn to the questions that sit underneath everything else: what is the world actually made of, and why does it behave the way it does? I'm not a professional physicist — I read, watch lectures, work through the ideas, and enjoy the slow process of understanding a little more each time.
Two areas fascinate me most: the quantum description of reality at the smallest scales, and astrophysics — the same physics written across the largest scales we can observe.
The very small
Quantum mechanics & QFT
Quantum mechanics is where intuition breaks down in the most interesting ways — superposition, entanglement, the uncertainty principle, and the strange role of measurement. It's a theory that is both bewildering and astonishingly accurate.
Quantum field theory (QFT) goes further: particles become excitations of underlying fields that fill all of space, and it underpins the Standard Model of particle physics. Wrapping my head around how relativity and quantum mechanics come together in QFT is a long-running and rewarding project.
The very large
Astrophysics
On the cosmic scale, the same laws produce stars, galaxies, black holes, and the large-scale structure of the universe itself. Stellar evolution, general relativity and gravity, the expansion of the cosmos, dark matter and dark energy, and the open questions in cosmology are endlessly compelling.
There's something grounding about it: the physics in a laboratory and the physics lighting up a distant galaxy are one and the same.