i don't know if they still teach kids classical physics or not, but i can tell you that i didn't want to let go of something i understood well for something that struck me as past the point of absurd and into the point of dystopic disinformation. i mean, i realized pretty quickly that i wasn't a scientist. i never had that quest for discovery that i guess a lot of kids had; i didn't have this zeal to fix the errors or solve the mysteries, i was just frustrated that i had to take the same course every year because it was wrong last year. rather than take the information as it was presented, fully cognizant that i'd eventually be told most of it is wrong, i found myself trying to get ahead of the program and figure out what they were going to tell me is actually wrong. the intent may have been to foster skepticism, but it instead left me unable to even take any of it seriously. i went for the assumptions nobody touches: photons obviously have mass, but you're assuming they don't, so then what?

a scientist would look at all of this as a challenge to work through. i wasn't remotely interested. what i wanted was to understand the truth, not to spend my time doing experiments and guessing what assumption was useful and what wasn't.

math offered me something that modern physics couldn't: it let me search for truth, rather than leave me guessing at approximations. but, i could have switched into math and taken physics courses on the side. i didn't. and, the reason i didn't was that i hated doing the labs; i hated using my hands, i hated doing the actual science. my electives were actually mostly math courses.

i've never fully shaken the idea that what they're teaching at the universities is a distraction, and that the government is carefully pulling kids out of classes to teach them the actual science. that's how little sense that quantum physics made to me: it struck me as a conspiracy against reason.

i don't want to live in a world defined by random probabilities. i want a theory of physics. and, i'm not interested in learning about the quantum theory, for that reason - whether it is true or not.