Tim may be the finest mind humanity had ever known, and yet when he tells other researchers what his field is, they scoff. This was because he is the world’s foremost expert on Headphone Physics.

Headphone Physics is a catch-all term for a common phenomenon that almost everybody has encountered, and yet almost nothing is known about it nor has much research been done into the cause. The effect is as follows: You’re listening to a portable music-playing device. When you finish you unplug the headphones and set them down on a table, desk drawer, or other suitably flat surface.You return later to collect the headphones for further use to find the cable has inexplicably tangled itself up. Attempting to untangle the cable eithers make it worse or, via some bizarre bends in the space-time continuum, succeed in unwinding the cable, but somehow result in greater embuggerance the next time you go to use them.

Tim’s current hypothesis is that headphones are sentient beings. He is not entirely wrong.