There are situations in which the correct solution turns out to be profoundly counterintuitive.

The simplest example: every day we see the Sun rise in the east, move across the sky, and set in the west. The intuitive conclusion is obvious — the Sun revolves around the Earth.

The counterintuitive answer, hard-won over centuries, was: no, it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun.

But contemporary physics quietly dismantles even this. Strictly speaking, neither body revolves “around” the other. The Earth and the Sun form a two-body system rotating around a common centre of mass. It just so happens that this centre lies inside the Sun — only about 450 kilometres from its centre, against a solar radius of 700,000 kilometres — because of the enormous difference in mass. The heliocentric model was not wrong. It was merely the next approximation.

Another example. Intuitively, rest appears natural, while motion seems forced. It takes effort to lift me from the couch; therefore, motion must require a cause.

Classical mechanics shattered this intuition: uniform motion is just as natural as rest. A body moving at constant velocity is physically indistinguishable from a body at rest unless something accelerates it.

But then the picture deepens again. Velocity itself is not particularly fundamental. Momentum is. And conservation of momentum, it turns out, is not an independent postulate — it follows from the simple fact that empty space looks the same in every direction. What we casually call “motion” becomes secondary: a convenient description, not the deepest layer of reality.

Or consider transparency.

To common sense, transparent materials appear exceptional. Most substances are opaque; glass and water seem like special cases. Yet closer examination suggests almost the opposite: opacity emerges from specific mechanisms — absorption, scattering, electronic transitions. Remove those mechanisms, and light passes through. Transparency is not the anomaly. It is what remains when disruption is absent.

Then quantum physics arrives and reframes the picture entirely.

Transparency does not mean that light passes through matter without interacting. On the contrary: light interacts with matter continuously. The incoming wave drives electrons into oscillation; those oscillating electrons radiate new waves; and the superposition of the original wave with all these secondary waves produces what emerges from the other side — travelling at a different speed, bent at the interface, yet coherent.

Transparency is not the absence of interaction. It is a very special form of interaction.

This pattern, it turns out, is not accidental. It is almost a law of scientific history.

Every generation inherits a worldview that feels self-evident. Every generation eventually discovers that this worldview was a special case — an approximation valid within certain limits, breaking down at the edges. And every corrected picture eventually reveals its own edges, beyond which something stranger again awaits.

The naive gives way to the counterintuitive. The counterintuitive, in time, gives way to something that defeats even the vocabulary of the previous revolution. “Particle” and “wave” are not descriptions of what quantum objects are — they are two inadequate metaphors, each capturing a corner of something that has no name in the language evolution gave us.

At some point, a strange realization emerges.

The deeper our understanding becomes, the less the Universe resembles human intuition. Which should not, perhaps, surprise us. Evolution did not shape the human brain to comprehend reality at fundamental scales. It shaped the brain to survive long enough to reproduce: to avoid predators, navigate social hierarchies, throw stones accurately, find food before somebody else did.

The Universe was never under any obligation to be understandable to creatures optimized for surviving on African savannas.

And yet here we are — those same creatures — having arrived, through sheer stubbornness and abstraction, at a picture of reality that thoroughly exceeds our own intuition.

That is perhaps the strangest fact of all.

In 1989, I was sent to escort a delegation of chemistry olympiad winners to the last All-Union Summer School for Young Chemists, held at the Orlyonok pioneer camp. The Soviet Union had two more years to live, but the world around us had already begun changing irreversibly. It was a strange mixture of old and new, and that mixture made your head spin — thrilling and terrifying at once.
I had never been to one of the all-union camps — Artek or Orlyonok. To get there as a child, you needed a family with serious connections, which we didn’t have. I wasn’t even bitter about it. Some people run faster, some are richer, some have the right friends — that’s just how things were. But as an adult, as it turned out, I made it to Orlyonok after all.
Orlyonok was impressive. A vast industrial complex for the processing of children’s souls, with well-oiled assembly lines. The operation began in Tuapse itself, where the camp maintained a reception facility in the town center; from there, small buses with counselors ferried the children — and us chaperones along with them — out to the camp. Walking the grounds end to end took at least an hour, though wandering freely was not encouraged. The camp was divided into several units, each functioning as a self-contained pioneer camp in its own right. Campers were expected to remain within their unit, under the close supervision of counselors and staff. The counselors lived in a separate nine-story building, which, among other things, had an excellent canteen serving decent food for cash. Pioneers were forbidden to enter there. They tried to keep us chaperones out, too, but by that point, we’d stopped caring about their rules.
We were given a couple of small cottages — ten people to a room, set among the trees, a few hundred meters from the sea. The bathroom was across the path. The dining hall was a ten-minute walk.
Our students attended lectures by eminent academics — professors from Moscow State University, teachers from specialized schools attached to major universities. We went to some of those lectures ourselves; they were often genuinely worthwhile. Otherwise, our only connection to camp life was the dining hall, three times a day.
The dining hall deserves its own story. In the old pre-perestroika days, it had probably fed people the way all Soviet pioneer camps did — adequately, if not well. But by 1989, food had become desperately scarce, the system was coming apart, and the meals were simply inedible. Our kids grimaced through every plate while we tried to model stoic acceptance. The problem was that it wasn’t an act we could sustain, because the food was genuinely awful — even by Soviet institutional catering standards.
Within days, we’d found our way to the counselors’ canteen. After that, to the village. We stocked up by the crate — liquor, canned goods, fruit — and lived on that. The kids had no such option. One afternoon, we found them staging a protest outside the dining hall, marching with signs that read: Better to die of hunger than of the food. After the demonstration, things improved slightly. Not enough to reach the threshold of edible, but slightly.
The delegations had come from all over the Soviet Union. Even the Balts showed up, though they already held themselves apart. My closest friends that summer, as it happened, were the chaperones from Lithuania and Latvia. I still sometimes find myself humming Ariau, ariau, ariau — a Lithuanian song that Algis, who was escorting the Lithuanian students, taught me. There were also delegations from France and the United States, in the spirit of new thinking, disarmament, and cooperation. The Americans immediately told everyone where to go and took their meals as a group in the counselors’ building. The French girls, meanwhile, were so eager to be close to our students that they refused the special foreign menu and gamely struggled through the same slop as everyone else. The result was universal: everyone loved the French and kept their distance from the Americans, who, for their part, didn’t seem to notice.
Then one day this quiet, ordered camp life ended.
Orlyonok had a patron organization — a nearby border guard detachment. The soldiers came every session; they came to ours as well. And as a gesture of particular goodwill, they let the students fire Kalashnikovs into the sea.
That shooting divided everyone instantly, cleanly, and for good.
Our Soviet kids were beside themselves with joy at having a real weapon in their hands with real ammunition. The Balts announced that this was entertainment for Neanderthals, huddled together, and suddenly stopped understanding Russian. The Americans and the beloved French girls went pale — all at once, somehow — packed their bags, and went home.
This didn’t happen on the last day of the session. There were more days after that, days in which things happened. Conversations, lectures, activities. But I remember none of them. Not a single thing. For some reason, that summer at the pioneer camp ended with those shots fired out across the water.

When I was eighteen, my parents decided I needed to visit my grandmother in Lviv. I’d been there at six and remembered nothing, of course. Grandmother had come to us since then, but now the family council concluded that their grown son ought to reconnect with his roots.
We waited for the university winter break, and I flew out. There was no direct flight from our city to Lviv, so I stopped first in Moscow to stay with my uncle. Those three days were great. For one thing, he smoked, which meant I could smoke right there in the room instead of running out to the street or the balcony. For another, after his many marriages and divorces, he had three daughters and not a single son — clearly a source of some frustration, because my uncle had plenty of hard-won life wisdom to pass on and no one to receive it. Then along came a nephew who loved to listen, paired with an uncle who loved to talk. Three days vanished in an instant, and I was on a plane to Lviv.
I fell in love with Lviv immediately. A completely enchanting city — every building, every cobblestone casting its spell. In the evenings, when my relatives came home from work or school, we’d sit and talk. In the mornings, I went out to wander.
It didn’t take long to discover, on Arsenalna Street — I may be misremembering, it’s been nearly forty years — a basement pub done up in the style of an old European tavern. I think the famous Reberna restaurant is there now. Beer barrels, oak tables, bare red brick. These days I’ve seen enough of that kind of thing to spot instantly what’s authentic and what’s dressed up to look old. But back then I was encountering a real medieval European city for the first time in my life, and inside it, a real medieval tavern. What’s more: for one ruble you could get two delicious open-faced sandwiches and four full mugs of magnificent Lviv beer, beside which everything I’d drunk before paled completely. So I arranged my daily routes through the city to arrive, reliably, somewhere around noon, at the entrance to that pub on Arsenalna. I’d walk in with a ruble and walk out slightly drunk and in a dreamy mood.
One evening, heading home to my grandmother’s from the pub, I came upon two women arguing loudly a couple of courtyards away. One — Russian — was calling the other a Banderivka; the other — Ukrainian — was firing back with Moskalka and Katsapka. And I felt a sudden pang of sadness: such a beautiful city! Such a lovely evening! I had beer and sandwiches in me and felt good about the world, and here were these women spending this perfect evening on nonsense. So I tried to make peace between them. Strangely enough, it worked — just not quite as I’d intended. Both respectable ladies looked me over, ran some quick anthropometric calculations, and promptly united. Together they informed me that “all kinds of little Jewish brats wander around here sticking their long noses into other people’s business.” Somehow they didn’t ruin my mood — thank you, beer; thank you, Lviv. But after that I stopped wading into neighborhood ethnic disputes. Not worth the trouble.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Masha grew up in a small town outside Moscow and had never given much thought to Jews. An ordinary Russian family: mom, dad, two daughters. Dad drank, and when he drank, he hit. Not every day, but in Masha’s opinion, way too often. When her sister turned eighteen and Masha was fifteen, he beat them all again, and the women of the family decided something had to change. That’s when it came out, to Masha’s considerable surprise, that her mother was actually Jewish — which meant they could go to Israel.
They filed the paperwork, packed their things, and soon enough were looking for an apartment in Jerusalem. Everything was strange and unfamiliar: the language, the people, the heat. Mom worked as a cleaner, day and night. Her sister found a husband — a religious guy she met at a friend’s place, love at first sight, no courtship period, straight to the wedding. Then mom announced she was going back to dad. Masha couldn’t understand it. She felt nothing for her father except fear and old hurt. She and her sister tried to talk mom out of it. They failed.
By the time Masha was drafted, three years later, she’d learned Hebrew and finished school. But with both parents living abroad, the army classified her as a “lone soldier” — no family in the country, which meant the military became her family. She didn’t mind. She liked the army. Good people. They looked out for her.
Then her grandmother died in Russia.
Masha loved her grandmother. She cried. She showed up at her commander’s office with a swollen face and asked for leave to go to the funeral. He gave her seven days. She booked a flight and applied for her Israeli passport.

At passport control in Sheremetyevo there was a line. Masha put her Israeli passport on the counter. The officer looked at her, read something on his screen, and asked her to step into a small room off to the side.
Two men were waiting. One was in uniform. The other wore a suit.
“Tell me, Maria,” said the uniformed one, “why did you present an Israeli passport to cross into Russia?”
“Is there a problem?”
“The problem is that according to our records, you are also a citizen of the Russian Federation. Under international law, dual citizens are required to use the passport of whichever country they’re currently in. So from the moment you crossed our border, you should be traveling on a Russian passport.”
Masha did have her Russian passport. She’d brought it along just in case. But it had expired years ago. The officers explained that they could let her into Russia, but she wouldn’t be able to leave on an expired document. She had no idea how long renewing it would take. She asked if she could make a phone call.
“Strict at work?” the officer asked.
“It’s the army.”
The two men exchanged a glance.
“Of course. Go ahead. We’ll be here.”
Her commander picked up immediately. He listened to her story and told her, in a tone that was not quite a suggestion, to get on the next flight out. Any flight. Back to Israel, or anywhere else. Just leave.
She ran to the ticket counter. The next Tel Aviv flight wasn’t for two days. She called her commander back. He told her to book anything — Istanbul, Bucharest, didn’t matter. She didn’t have the money. He pushed funds to her card. We’ll sort it out later. Just go. She bought a ticket to Istanbul. Three and a half hours.

She was sitting in the departure lounge when the two men appeared again.
“Maria, we’ve been waiting for you,” said the officer, pleasantly. “Come with us. No need to sit here for hours.”
She wasn’t sure how they planned to help her. She followed them anyway — some automatic reflex, the same one that made you comply when you were fifteen and your father was in that kind of mood.
They sat her down. They asked her to write out the location of her base. Her commander’s name. The names of other officers. Her service number.
Masha started to understand that something had gone very wrong.
She said she wasn’t allowed to give them that information.
The man in the suit leaned forward. “Then you’re never leaving this room. Forget Israel.”
“Maria.” The officer’s voice stayed warm, almost friendly. “This is a formality. We already know all of this. We just need to confirm you’re telling us the truth. Then we put you on your plane. No one outside this room ever knows.”
Masha said nothing. She shook her head. She started to cry. It was the same paralysis she remembered from childhood — her father’s voice, the moment before — when your body just stops and there’s nothing left to do but wait for it to be over.
“All right,” said the officer. “I can see you’d rather do this the hard way.”
They put her in a cell. An actual cell, in the basement of the airport — she hadn’t known such a thing existed. A small room with bars on the window and a cot bolted to the floor. No mattress. No blanket. She sat on the cot with her knees pulled to her chest. Her phone was gone. She had no watch. She didn’t know how long she sat there. Long enough that she stopped being sure any of it was real — the base, her commander, Israel itself. The whole previous life felt like something she might have dreamed.

Then the door opened.
A different officer. Not one she recognized. He handed back her phone, her backpack, her wallet, and walked her to the gate. The plane to Istanbul was still there. She didn’t ask why. She didn’t say anything. She walked down the jetway and found a seat and as soon as they were airborne she fell asleep and didn’t wake up until they were landing.
From the terminal she called her commander.
Everything’s fine, he said. Someone will find you.
Two minutes later, a pair of young men appeared. Something about them — she couldn’t have said what exactly — told her immediately they were Israeli. They asked in Hebrew if she wanted to eat something, or rest, before they got her on the El Al flight home.
That was it. The adventure was over.

(This happened a few year ago. It’s a true story. I’ve changed the name and a few details. But the Sheremetyevo border guards, the expired passport, the recruitment pitch, the two hours in a detention cell, the emergency extraction — that’s all real. Which I find genuinely disturbing.)

I’ve long since gotten used to the fact that words keep changing their meanings. (That’s a lie — you never really get used to it.) It’s normal, the world changes, and we change with it. Today, the pantomime for “writing” isn’t a pen moving across paper — it’s both hands typing on a keyboard. An “article” isn’t something you read anymore; it’s something you watch. A “book” is increasingly something you listen to. A “letter” hasn’t been on paper for decades. And email itself is already going the way of the telegram, replaced by messaging apps — which, by the way, people increasingly dictate rather than type.
Some basic concepts are simply lost on the younger generation. Almost nobody knows what “ironing” means anymore. Here in Israel, winter clothing has largely disappeared, and seasonal footwear is following. If a young Israeli buys a jacket, it probably means he’s heading to a ski resort in Austria. “Bicycle” and “scooter” now prompt the question: how long does the battery last?
A few years ago, a cop stopped me for riding my bike on the sidewalk. He wanted to write me a ticket — the law prohibits electric bikes on sidewalks. I told him that if he could find anything electrical on my bike, I’d pay the fine plus a personal bonus. He spent a while looking for a motor, then stood there blinking in disbelief. He was genuinely disappointed.
Yesterday, my son came home for his first weekend leave from the army. We asked whether he had enough clean socks and underwear, or if they had laundry facilities on base. He said he had plenty — his socks had been recycled. Our son knows perfectly well what “doing laundry” means: you put things in the washing machine and turn it on. Or hand them to Mom — she knows better. There’s no washing machine on their base. So instead of washing his socks, he recycles them — with water, soap, and his hands.
Where is the world headed? Or have I just missed the train?

There is a particular kind of problem which resists all reasonable effort, yet resolves itself the moment one ceases to observe it.

Computing has refined this into a dependable mechanism. One adjusts a setting, checks the result, finds nothing. Checks again, this time with greater attention, as if attention itself might exert influence. Still nothing. A third attempt follows, now with a certain irritation, and perhaps a minor change introduced for the sake of feeling active. The result remains unchanged.
At this point the process acquires a curious psychological weight. The system appears not merely unresponsive, but almost unwilling. One begins to suspect hidden rules, undocumented constraints, or, failing that, a quiet hostility in the machinery.

And then — not as a strategic decision, but out of mild exhaustion — one stops. The screen is left as it is. The matter is deferred, if only for a moment.
The domain resolves. The page appears. The kettle boils.

The explanation is mundane enough. Caches expire, records propagate, background processes conclude their negotiations. Nothing in the system has changed in response to the observer’s withdrawal. And yet, subjectively, the effect is indistinguishable from causation.

The phenomenon does not reward formalisation. It persists precisely because it operates at the edge of intention, where action gives way to waiting, and waiting, reluctantly, turns out to be sufficient.