Here is the beginning of my book "The Physics of Bitcoin".
CHAPTER ONE
A Life at the Edge of Order and Chaos
The lecture had been sitting in my browser tab for three days. I kept meaning to watch it, kept getting pulled away by the ordinary business of a scientist's life — data to analyze, papers to review, the endless small fires of academic existence. It was 2012, and I was a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, a long way from the Louisiana college where I had spent seven years teaching physics, and a longer way still from the Italian child who had built his first telescope at the ag