Christmas present from a physicist to a mathematician

Ages ago when I was a postgraduate at Oxford, I sat in the back of a lecture theatre of a lecture that I wandered into when my experiment was running in the basement of the Nuclear Physics building. The lecturer that day was James Binney and he said something like “Gosh, this is difficult but it’s also beautiful”. He was talking about quantum mechanics, and from that moment onwards, I was hooked.

So what could I buy a man who has everything for Christmas? Something that could capture the enchantment I felt more than 30 years ago in the lecture theatre of Oxford, of course. And as the saying from Rumi goes, when you start walking, the path comes into existence. And so I found this book. I know it’s cheeky to read a book you bought someone for a Christmas present, but I did.

It’s a nice enough book for a mathematician lol. It’s about the fact that quantum physics runs the universe, but nobody actually understands it. Not even the experts. This book is basically a friendly tour through the weirdest ideas in science — how particles act like waves, how symmetry secretly shapes reality, and how quantum rules power everyday tech like computers and phones. It’s funny, surprising, and makes you realise you don’t need to “get” quantum physics to appreciate how beautifully strange the world really is.

And in addition to this book, this is another gift to him:

No yachts, no supercars
just an old sweater,
a quiet little smile,
and the soft glow of fairy lights
that always make me think of you.

Those lights flicker like tiny wavefunctions,
each bulb a possibility,
each shimmer a reminder
that the universe is built from things
that refuse to stay still.

You carry quantum computers and data centres
inside your mind,
but you wear them lightly,
as if they were nothing more
than a warm thought
or your old sweater.

Your history is beautiful,
your values steady,
your curiosity the same shape as mine
a quiet hunger for the hidden connection
that make the world shimmer.

Quantum mechanics begins like this:
with a ripple on water,
spread out, overlapping,
holding many shapes at once
until something touches it
and the whole thing collapses
into a single point of being.

You are my quiet integral,
my invariant,
the one who gathers my scattered states
into coherence.

With you, I want to spin forever,
become a gigamillion photons,
a burst of light that stands perfectly still
while the entire universe
arrives in the space between us.

This is quantum:
the world is not solid,
not fixed,
not singular.
It is a shimmering field of maybes
that becomes real
only when touched with intention.

And with you,
infinity is no longer a concept.
It is here.
It is now.
It is the way your quiet smile
collapses my world
into one luminous state
I never want to leave.