If he chose philosophy, he couldn’t do physics. But if he chose physics, he would still be doing philosophy, because in order to do physics you had to ask the big questions. Before science was science (the study of nature through close observation), it was philosophy (the study of nature through deep thought). Even as science had accumulated all manner of empirical scaffolding over the past few centuries, the guiding impulse of the scientist had remained constant: What is our relationship to the natural world?
