M — Musing

Years ago, an email landed in my inbox from someone I didn’t know.

Poetry professor. Wanted to talk about quantum mechanics. Offered to buy me a coffee.

My first reaction was uncharitable.

I can buy my own coffee.

I get a version of this email regularly — someone with a theory, a question, a paper they want me to read, five minutes they want to pick my brain. The offer to buy coffee is usually a politeness, not a negotiation. And I was, at that moment, a busy physicist with a full calendar and a clear sense of which conversations were worth having.

I almost didn’t reply.

Then I noticed she had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Not for physics. For poetry. Which, if I’m being honest, didn’t immediately change my calculus — poetry and quantum mechanics occupy different epistemic neighborhoods. One trades in compression and ambiguity. The other in testable prediction.

Or so I believed.

I agreed to meet.

Assumptions vs. reality

The conversation didn’t unfold the way I expected.

She wasn’t trying to understand the math.

She was trying to understand what the math feels like — how physicists live with uncertainty, probability, superposition. What it means to describe reality with symbols that resist ordinary language.

It was a different vector of inquiry.

Not less rigorous — just orthogonal.

We talked about measurement, indeterminacy, the strangeness of observation shaping outcome. She translated ideas I usually express in equations into compression, metaphor, rhythm.

I realized something subtle:

Physics reduces the universe to its most economical description.

Poetry attempts the same for experience — with the additional constraint that the description must be felt, not just verified.

I’m not sure which is harder.

The part I almost missed

In 2014, Rae Armantrout went on to teach a course called Poetry for Physicists — a title that would have sounded implausible to the earlier version of me who nearly ignored her email.It was (and sadly remains) the only time a UCSD course was offered in both Literature and Physics Departments.

Later, one of her poems &mdash Accounts— sparked, improbably, by that coffee meeting — was selected for Best American Poetry of 2012 … and she dedicated it to me!

I sometimes think about the thin contingency there.

A few seconds of impatience, and that entire chain of events disappears from my personal universe. No conversation. No course. No poem.

From my perspective, it would have vanished without a trace — because the most significant missed opportunities leave no observable signal.

They look exactly like nothing.

A recurring pattern

This is the unsettling part.

The near-miss didn’t feel dramatic at the time.

It felt ordinary. Efficient. Reasonable.

That’s how cognitive filters work.

They protect attention by discarding what seems low-value.

But filters optimized for survival aren’t optimized for discovery.

In physics, the breakthroughs hide in anomalies — the data points you’re tempted to throw away.

In life, they often arrive as emails you almost ignore.

The mirror I didn’t expect

I think about Rae Armantrout’s email when I read the messages I now receive from people who want five minutes and offer to buy me coffee.

My instinct is the same as it was then.

Busy. Full calendar. Low prior probability that this particular conversation will go anywhere.

I haven’t solved the cognitive filter problem. I’ve just become the physicist on the other side of it.

Which is why I now hold office hours at $1,000 per hour — every dollar to charity — not as a revenue mechanism but as an epistemological one. If you’re willing to put real skin in the game, I’ll take the meeting as seriously as I should have taken Rae Armantrout’s email the first time I read it.

Book office hours →

The price buys a lot of coffee.

More importantly, it removes my judgment from the equation — which, as it turns out, is the variable most in need of calibration.

The uncomfortable implication

I’ve almost certainly already declined the conversation that would have mattered most. So have you. The counterfactual is permanently inaccessible. The experiment cannot be rerun.

The wavefunction collapsed, and neither of us was measuring.

That’s not a reason for paralysis. It’s a reason to treat your own cognitive filters with the same skepticism you’d apply to a measurement instrument you haven’t calibrated.

Notice the instant a quiet dismissal forms. Then ask once:

What discovery am I about to filter out?

Most of the time, nothing important happens.

But occasionally someone offers to buy you a coffee, and the universe gets slightly larger because you said yes.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian