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For Anna, a second-year physics student drowning in dry coursework and rigid formulas, it was like stepping into another world. Julian didn’t care for protocols or publications. His lab was messy, unconventional, sometimes borderline absurd — but it pulsed with life.

For two years, Anna worked alongside him. Long nights. Endless arguments over theories that blurred the line between madness and genius. They weren’t friends exactly. Not at first. But there was a strange rhythm between them — part mentor, part co-conspirator.

Julian refused to be ordinary. That much was clear from the start. At the heart of all his chaos was a single obsession — he believed that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was, in his words, “lazy philosophy dressed up as science.”

“Probability?” he’d scoff late at night, pacing the lab like a man possessed. “Probability is the excuse you use when you don’t actually understand what’s happening.”

What he wanted — what he insisted was possible — was a new framework. A way to describe quantum behavior without collapsing it into mere observation. He talked about something he called “The Absolute State Theory” — wild, raw ideas about the universe existing in fixed states beyond human perception, untouched by the observer effect. Most dismissed it as ego-driven fantasy.

Anna? She wasn’t so sure.

Sometimes — in that fragile space between exhaustion and wonder — it almost made sense.

Julian would cover entire walls in frantic equations, diagrams of multi-state systems, theoretical particles no textbook mentioned. His lab was littered with old chalkboards and scraps of paper like crime scene evidence for a mystery only he could see.

"Everyone treats Schrödinger’s cat like a joke," he told Anna once, jabbing a piece of chalk so hard it snapped in his fingers. "Alive and dead? Rubbish. The cat is either alive or dead — not both. We just don’t have the tools to see it properly."

It wasn’t just physics to him anymore. It was personal. A crusade.

He wanted to rewrite the fundamental rules of reality — or die trying.

And for a while… Anna believed he might actually do it.