they may fix the weather in the world

Physics was never necessarily his favorite of the sciences. In fact, even as a polymath, he's always been fairly ambivalent on the conversational application of calculus. Laminar flow is as intuitive as it needs to be, and the approximate relationship between blood viscosity and shear rate takes care of the rest.

Biology. Chemistry. Biochemistry and orgo. The term "pre-med" is gunning for synonymous with "gushy green science of classifications" and House doesn't even mind because it's the kind of knowledge you can endlessly mine for facts that every adult human should know and every child-size one should be curious about.

How babies are made, really, in the tubes, and how it's different when animals do it. Why dihydrogen monoxide is so dispassionately abundant. What motivates the Maillard reaction beyond "crispy caramelized chicken skin tastes good" (well, maybe that one gets a pass).

Oh, and it's deliriously fun to be able to drop the hammer on anti-vax parents who purport to hate chemicals in any dispensation and think that rBST caused the oughties' rash of woke revolution. Yeah, sure, and it's a coincidence that your kids are liable to turn gay right when they start developing an influx of those nasty naturally-occurring sex hormones in conjunction with the advent of sentient, solipsistic thought.

It's good to know about stuff people take for granted. It really does make you holier than all those thous, and goodness knows House gets a god-honoring spiritual high from strutting his stuff around being on high.

He's not an academic and certainly not a scholar. Hardly a wide-eyed scribe. Moreover, he's just not an idiot - one of the few widespread mental afflictions he's been lucky enough to avoid.

Enter physics, then: the ideal arena for an antisocial cynic. Yeah, you have to argue your way through the Big Bang instead of the big bangs of copulating caimans and calcipods, but that's what atheists are born to do. Probably why, too.

Tomorrow, you might find the answer to everything. Today, you still know nothing, just like you did yesterday and the day before.

No answer key. No chain reaction. Just you and your observations.

Funnily enough, he hasn't considered the hypothetical PhD since just prior to going to medical school and subsequently getting kicked out. But it's stayed in his back pocket, even still. Just in case people ever got to thinking that he was too practical, unable to restrain himself and remain theoretical in his impulses.

It's all theoretical, obviously. He pools data on a whiteboard. He won't deign to look at his patients. Just because it's theoretical doesn't make it any less real.

And in the name of such proudly abstract scientific thought, House doesn't really go in for all that "atoms never actually touch, so you've never actually made direct contact with anything or anyone" crap. Textures are still textures. Feelings are still feelings. As far as the empirical, anecdotal, explanation, that's all touching is.

A sense. You might as well say that the sensory information your nose gets from the air is illusory because you haven't really come into contact with the chemicals.

Yeah, you did. The sulfur phased right through your mucous membrane and hit your rotten-egg pleasure center. That's contact. That's sensing. That's feeling.

That's knowing that it's not a coincidence, the way you see a shaggy patch of snow on the street beyond your front walk and you anticipate what it will feel like and then you step and even through your boots you know, no doubt, that it's there.

Like saying that the things you see, you haven't really seen, because they sort of just appeared in front of you, impersonally and unaffected by your choice to observe.

So that's on senses. House believes in the power of the physical world. Sometimes he really, really wishes he didn't have to, but he is a realist more than he is an idealist. A broken man, accepting it, a mere slave under the inescapable tyranny of holistically experienced pain.

It doesn't matter if he thinks it or he feels it, or if only he thinks he feels it. All are present cogs of the same machine. One has power over the other.

One such thing he thinks, feels, absorbs in the distant hope to someday self-absolve is the way the aftermath of a snowstorm affects his leg. The scar, yes, the scourge of barometric pressure, but also, what's left of the rest of it. The nerves. The tendons. The patella pulley.

(Let's consider kinetic friction.)

When able-bodied people walk - for the sake of argument, while wearing Nike Shox or some other overengineered footwear mechanism cleverly converting polyurethane or ethylene vinyl acetate into a damping system that responds only reasonably well to the cold - they obey gravity to press the resistance of their lateral and transverse arches against the ground, and the ground resists back up at them, normally.

House, never obedient even when contrite, does not obey gravity. Neither is he happy about it. Able-bodied people get to walk away with their whole leg striding along. They step more slowly when advancing around hardened piles of black-flecked slush, at first lightly and then more heavily than would be their usual. And as they finish walking and get inside, to the house or the car or the restaurant, the precipitation follows them, leaving wet little dissolute traces until it fades back into the nothingness of never-really-there.

He of the bum leg and beat-upon cane feels like he leaves a little piece of himself in the dirty street, a cracked-off bit of bumper or splash guard that doesn't do anything to change the value of the car's function but still makes it different than whole. Still drags on the ground at any speed over thirty-five miles an hour.

Like a foreign language learner who drills hard on the numbers, the whos and whats and why and wheres and whens, please and thank you and danke, bitte, auf wiedersehn, and then approaches a native speaker to whom they're providing some other aspirationally alinguistic service pretending that that makes it all okay.

Oh, oh, I understand you - look, I decided to play with your little toys, your words, your common sense of comprehension. But you understand me, right? You understand English, right?

What lacks, in this scenario, is the apprehension of the ultimate state these two conversants expect to find each other in: the monolingual patriot imagines the other to have already confronted the eternal elision of choosing in which language they think, to magically understand everything, while the bilingual expatriate doesn't expect the other to know anything at all.

A temporary ailment. A never-ending gulf.

Everything interpreted, taken for granted.

I know you're in pain, House, they say. They wave it, a miserable carrot. But it's no excuse, they say. They chide it, a triumphant grouse. You can't keep acting this way.

What other way is there to act? The pavement is eating his particles. The lack of acclimatized accent is eroding the sport of the tongue.

Just because you've been born with a mouth and the nerves for a pain sensation, you think you know what it's like. You think you've felt the recoil from the shooting.

You think you've lost your fluency, just by looking at me. You think you can feel anything, without touching it, the same.

Someone, somewhere, eventually has to break the news that the thought experiments they're constantly conducting about his levels and his tolerance just don't cut it. Never have, never will. That instantaneous inculcation is never very likely to be the prize for pedagogical instantiation.

Maybe, just maybe, this isn't something you can communicate. It isn't something the five, six or seven senses find fit to observe.

You can't play pretend. You can't conjure it by osmosis nor by omission. You can't really touch it. It isn't really there.

(My leg, my leg...it isn't really there!)

There's a unifying theory they all want to find, an intergalactic bridge between the House that was and the House that is.

But they can't. They won't. It's impossible. The muscle is missing.