April 20, 2025. Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Philosophy.

Some of you reading my posts might have noticed a pattern, references to quantum states, wave functions, and physics principles woven throughout my thoughts on entrepreneurship and life. Perhaps you've wondered where this all comes from. This post aims to answer that question, tracing the path from my childhood curiosity to mathematics, physics, philosophy, and quantum mechanics, and how these fields have shaped how I see the world.

I wasn't born with any special brain power or genius genes. My earliest memory is simply being very curious about everything. When I was around five years old, I remember accidentally breaking my TV remote. Inside I found an amazing world of wires and parts. I had no idea what I was looking at. This was the mid 2000s, Google wasn't very helpful yet, and I didn't know any English. But that moment of finding what was inside lit a spark in me.

This curiosity spread to language too. During a family vacation to Bandung or Jakarta (I can't quite remember which), my parents took me to a used book fair. I had loved magazines and cartoons before, but seeing so many different books in one place blew my mind. I remember picking up a book, I think it was a cookbook, and feeling confused by the text.

"Mom, why can't I understand what's written in this book?" I asked in Indonesian.

"Oh, it's in English, sonny. You need to learn that first if you want to read it," she replied.

Standing there, looking at stacks of books with beautiful pictures and eye catching covers in languages I couldn't understand, something clicked. I realized I needed to learn English if I wanted to get to all this knowledge.

This moment became even clearer when I visited my Chinese Indonesian neighbor. His father was watching a Wukong DVD in Mandarin. I asked, "What language is that, ko?" He told me it was Mandarin, stopped the show, and gave me a quick lesson in the language, teaching me a few words and some history.

When I got home and started going through TV channels, I found news channels like BBC, CNN, or Al Jazeera in English. I realized this was how I could learn the language. From there, I began watching cartoons in English and later started buying English comic books, beginning my journey into English reading.

Around the age of 7 or to 9, my mother enrolled me in a small tutoring program, like Kumon but only for math. It wasn't in a big center but in someone's home with just two students, me and a boy named Fajar, who later moved to Bandung.

I found that I really loved math, and moved all the way up to pre calculus. In my point of view which is a small world, I thought everyone was good at math. I didn't learn until later that this wasn't true. Most people actually found it hard.

During a trip to Gramedia (a famous Indonesian bookstore where my parents often took me), I found a calculus book. Since I had enjoyed math so far, I started reading it but quickly found it was much harder than I expected. My teacher had warned me that calculus might be too hard for me right now, and seeing this was true, I closed the book. 

I now think of this as one of my biggest regrets.

Around this time, we were learning about the solar system in school. I loved the pictures in our textbooks and started spending hours in the school library reading about planets. My next trip to Gramedia ended with me buying astronomy books instead of math books.

My imagination went wild. I would daydream about walking on the moon, seeing Earth from far away, or running across the sandy hills of Mars. At school, there was a small hill where my friends and I would sneak off to, and after getting deep into astronomy, it became my playground for space adventures.

This interest grew even more when I found Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey," which was on TV every Tuesday night in Indonesia. I still remember him saying, "Physics is the language of God to teach us," and explaining that math was the foundation of physics. Through this show, I learned about Newton, Einstein, and others who I came to see as having made huge contributions to our world.

That was the start of my love for physics. It reached its peak during junior high school, where I joined competitions and won several. There was something really satisfying about understanding the basic rules of how things worked.

As I became a teenager, I got more interested in basketball and other normal teen stuff, but this time also marked when I first found philosophy. By now, internet access was better, my English was good, and suddenly I could access almost everything except stuff behind paywalls.

I read like crazy, Plato, Smith, Marx, even Nietzsche. My reading was all over the place and covered lots of topics, but it felt important at the time. I read autobiographies and so many other books, growing my understanding beyond just physics and math.

When it was time to pick a university, I wanted to go to one of the top schools in Indonesia, but my parents wanted me to stay in my hometown for personal reasons. We made a deal: I would stay local, but they would let me choose my future path completely on my own. 

Looking back, i think it was a good compromise.

My first year of university happened during COVID, so all classes were online. This gave me lots of freedom to try different things through volunteering and work. In my second year, when we went back to campus, I decided I wanted to become a world class engineer. I looked for mentors and threw myself into learning.

Around this time I discovered ChatGPT, which was a big moment for me. Finishing some weekend projects using this, I became sure that the future of artificial intelligence and thinking machines was real. I started focusing on topics related to data and computation, looking for research opportunities, internships, and chances to shadow professionals in the field.

These experiences changed how I thought about things. Before, I thought I couldn't become an entrepreneur, especially in a slow economy where new businesses needed huge amounts of money. But in 2024, watching people like Sam Altman talk about their products and reading research papers, I saw Americans, Chinese, and Europeans all moving in the same direction at the forefront of human innovation. 

That's when I changed my path.

I realized this was my time, my chance to seize an opportunity. 

In my view, the invention of ChatGPT wasn't as world changing as the internet or the computer, it was more like humans learning to control fire. 

Something simple but revolutionary, giving us the freedom to do almost anything with it.

Also during this time, I dove deep into quantum physics and mechanics. I learned that there isn't just one fixed state that defines something, only possibilities exist until we observe them and make them real. This idea completely changed how I understand space, time, and reality. It truly changed how I think about and see the world.

As I wrote in my earlier posts about quantum states and possibilities, this isn't just book knowledge to me, it's a way of understanding everything from starting a business to human potential. When I talk about existing in multiple states of possibility until a choice makes one of them real, I'm not just using fancy words. I'm applying a basic understanding of how reality works.

Learning that solid matter is mostly empty space held together by forces, that particles can exist in many states at once, that the act of watching something changes it, these ideas from quantum physics have become ways for me to understand human systems, how innovation happens, and my own journey as a founder.

My interest in quantum mechanics isn't separate from my business path, it's a key part of it. It gives me words to describe the possibilities that exist before choices are made, how seemingly separate things are connected, and the basic uncertainty in all progress.

When I describe trying to build something new as existing in a quantum state of possibility, I'm using ideas I've studied for years, from those early days reading about space to my university classes in physics engineering.

This is where the view I bring to my posts, my projects, and my vision for the future comes from. 

It's not just a bunch of interesting comparisons, it's a way of seeing the world that has grown from a lifetime of curiosity about how reality works, starting with a broken remote control and a child wondering what made it work.

So when you read my thoughts on creating new possibilities, questioning established systems, or existing in states of uncertainty, know that these ideas come from my deep connection with physics, quantum mechanics, and philosophy, fields that have given me tools to think about problems in ways that normal approaches often miss.

This journey from childhood curiosity to quantum understanding keeps growing. Each new discovery, each new connection between seemingly unrelated fields, strengthens my belief that the best solutions come from seeing the world through multiple viewpoints at once, much like how light can be both a wave and a particle at the same time.