I've been taking a course called *Black Holes & Relativity* by astrophysicist Brian Keating.
And yesterday, somewhere between electrons, E=mc², nuclear bombs, hydrogen, radioactive decay and why the hell iron sits near the sweet spot of nuclear stability, I realized something interesting about how I'm using AI.
I'm not using it to avoid thinking.
I'm using it to **think harder.**
The course mentioned that electrons are elementary particles.
Okay.
But somewhere in my head I'd always associated electrons with electricity. Electricity is energy. So how can an electron be a particle with mass AND somehow be energy?
That question bothered me.
So I opened ChatGPT and started pulling the thread.
And I mean *pulling the fucking thread.*
What exactly is energy?
Is energy a substance?
When we say matter gets "converted into energy," what actually happened to the matter?
When uranium fissions, are the protons destroyed?
No.
They're rearranged into different nuclei.
So where does the energy come from?
Binding energy.
Okay, then why does smashing hydrogen nuclei *together* also release energy? Shouldn't binding them require energy?
And suddenly we're talking about nuclear stability, fusion, fission, iron, isotopes, deuterium, tritium, radioactivity, Chernobyl and what radiation actually IS.
None of that was planned.
I was driving around having a conversation and refusing to move past something until the model in my head actually made sense.
And that's becoming one of my favorite uses of AI.
The course is still the course. Brian Keating is still the astrophysicist teaching me physics. AI isn't replacing him.
It's sitting beside me while I learn and allowing me to say:
"Wait. I don't understand that."
"But if that's true, then wouldn't THIS also have to be true?"
"Okay, then explain this."
"Nope. Still don't get it. Start further back."
And I can keep doing that until something clicks.
That's profoundly different from the way most of us were educated.
Normally the lecture keeps moving.
The book keeps going.
The class ends.
And eventually you learn to nod at things you don't actually understand.
AI doesn't require me to do that.
I can stop the entire fucking universe at the electron and stay there until I'm satisfied.
And strangely, rather than making me intellectually dependent, I'm finding that this makes me more intellectually sovereign.
I don't have to accept something because an authority said it.
I can question it.
Test it.
Follow the implications.
Discover where my own assumptions are wrong.
And then go back to the original material understanding more than I did before.
That's not outsourcing my thinking! (which is the thing I'm trying to convey the most. Use Ai to get smarter, to think deeper, to understand more, and to practically improve your LIFE!)
I have a ridiculously patient thinking partner available whenever curiosity catches fire.
And apparently yesterday, curiosity caught fire somewhere around uranium-235.