People ask why I wanted to go to the frontier specifically. Why not just learn physics for its own sake, stop somewhere comfortable, and call it a good education?
The honest answer is that I wanted to know if it was possible. Not whether I could understand quantum mechanics or general relativity. Those felt within reach given time. I wanted to know if a person with no physics background, working with an AI, could reach the actual edge of what is known, in weeks instead of years, and produce something genuinely new.
I suspected the answer was yes. I did not know for certain.
The edge has a quality that the interior does not. In the interior, everything has been worked out. The textbooks agree. The problems have solutions. The edge is where the textbooks stop and the papers start, and the papers disagree, and the solutions are provisional, and someone somewhere is wrong about something important.
That uncertainty is interesting. Not as a source of anxiety, but as a signal that there is real work to do.
I also wanted to understand something about the method. When I started, I thought the question was whether I could learn fast enough. What I found was that the question was whether I could learn to ask good questions fast enough. The learning is fast. The question-quality is the bottleneck, and it improves with practice.
The edge is where that practice matters most. In the interior, you can get by with bad questions because the answers are in the back of the book. At the edge, there is no back of the book. You have to earn the direction.
That is why the edge.