Across the course of many hedonistic years, I had amassed the reputation of a crude reductionist. I’d heard about the achievements of physics, but I’d always countered them with what I considered to be a nimble argument: life is too much fun to spend on things that don’t bring about a sugar rush.

And so I went forth, trundling through life and stopping only for treats.

Then, one night, I was visited by Einstein’s ghost in the middle of a ten-minute fasting window. He rapped at my window and scared the big bowl of popcorn out of my arms. I’d never seen a ghost before and I didn’t much care for it. Suddenly there was popcorn in my hair and I felt demeaned.

“You are wasting your life,” alleged Einstein’s ghost, before proceeding to show me my future. “See what I mean?” he said.

“No,” I replied. “I like taking baths and I like strippers. Comfort is like gravity, and I don’t argue with gravity.”

Einstein’s ghost looked bitterly disappointed and, worse, stumped. He might have been bright, but he had forgotten an inviolable truth: you can’t reason with a reductionist cabbage.

Two days later, he was seen scoffing cookies and injecting heroin into Isaac Newton’s eyeballs. Finally, the dead were living, and I felt singularly responsible.