The physics of getting fired

Physics offered me a sense of order and purpose. But when life got messy I realised it had a much deeper insight to give

by Zahaan Bharmal  BIO

Photo by Jiran/Unsplash

is a senior director at Google, writing in a personal capacity. A former policy adviser at the World Bank and the UK civil service, he is a graduate of the University of Oxford and was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University. He is the author of The Art of Physics (2024), and lives in York, UK.

Edited bySally Davies

The senior partner didn’t waste any time. ‘I’m sorry, Zahaan,’ he said, ‘your services are no longer required at the firm.’ We sometimes called him the Burger King behind his back, because he ate a Whopper Meal at his desk every day. I’d never spoken to him before, and now I never would again.

It was the summer of 2001. I was fresh out of university and nine months into my first job as a management consultant in London. My parents had allowed me to move back into my old room, where I routinely collapsed after getting home from the office well after midnight. Professional life was punishing, but I gave it my all. For a brief time, I felt like I was flying: at my first performance review, I was told I had ‘partner potential’.

But then I got a phone call, telling me that one of the senior American partners wanted to meet me. That was unusual; but then again, I’d been working so hard and getting such good feedback, I figured it couldn’t be anything too bad. I was directed to an office on the first floor, several levels below where I usually sat.

After he fired me, my ears buzzed and my chest tightened; I don’t remember much else, except being told that I shouldn’t even return to my desk. It became apparent that the location of the meeting had been chosen because it would allow me to take a single flight of stairs down to the ground floor. No one would need to see me, and I wouldn’t need to speak to anyone.

The decision felt cruel and unfair. But more than anything, it seemed to violate the laws that for many years had been my way of making sense of the world: the laws of physics. Cause and effect, action and reaction. What followed was an unlikely journey – one in which the equations I thought I’d left behind at university became, unexpectedly, a companion through the messiest parts of life.

Before work, before university, I attended a competitive and prestigious all-boys school in London. While I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunities my education afforded me, life still felt tough for me as a lonely and anxious teenager. The school’s social currency was confidence, quick comebacks, and an effortless cool I never quite mastered. I often felt like I was watching from the edges, trying to decode the rules of a game that everyone else grasped intuitively.

The only thing that got me through was physics. The most fundamental of the sciences, physics represented a world that was perfectly ordered. It offered structure, rules and predictability. There was no social speculation; I could just work hard and try to figure things out. Problems and solutions, equations and outcomes. It didn’t matter how popular I was – what mattered was whether I understood the system. Slowly, the chaos of the world developed a sense of form and structure.

That clarity stayed with me, through school and into university. I read physics at Oxford, convinced for a long time that I wanted to become a scientist. It wasn’t always easy; there were late nights, bitter struggles with problem sets, moments I wondered if I’d ever get it. But when it clicked, it was wonderful: entropy, quantum mechanics, cosmology, all those deep, strange laws that govern the Universe. Physics seemed like it had a purpose, and I thought we’d go the distance.

But at some point in my final year at university, things started to change. Physics still fascinated me, but I found myself drawn to other subjects too – politics, economics, business. I wanted to understand not just how the Universe worked, but how people did. So after graduating, I decided to leave physics behind and see where those other interests would take me.

For the first time in years, physics seems to be at the heart of the cultural zeitgeist

As it turns out, when I stepped away from physics, many others did too. In the years after I left university at the turn of the millennium, physics began to fade from view in the English classroom. In 2006, physics A-level entries (post-16 qualifications in the UK) were down 37 per cent from where they were in 1991. The absolute numbers have since rebounded – but not for everyone. Today, the gender gap remains stark: only 23 per cent of A-level physics entries in 2026 came from girls, a figure that hasn’t budged much in decades. And more than half of GCSE physics classes in England (taken by 14- to 16-year-olds) are taught by a non-specialist, with a shortage of some 3,500 physics teachers nationally.

Research looking at why students choose or reject physics has found that it’s seen as abstract, difficult, and disconnected from real life – a perception that’s remained steady, even as enrolment has recovered. Meanwhile, newer fields – computer science, behavioural economics, even data journalism – have felt more immediate, more applicable. They speak the language of now.

What’s strange is that this perception problem has happened at the same historical moment in which physics has begun popping up in other surprising places.

Dominic Cummings, the strategist behind Brexit and later Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, gave physics a fair share of the credit for the success of his campaigns. In one of his highly........

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