Matthew Pest,
Physicist / Engineer / DJ
These Converse high-tops were painted by one of my best friends and given to me as a birthday gift. We both went to school for Physics, but he really knew his stuff and went on to work at CERN, in France, after we graduated. Now he's getting his PhD! He painted a lot of things when we were in College. Most of those things were Converse high-tops.
In addition to being a homemade gift from an awesomely talented human being, there's another reason these shoes evoke memories. It's the imagery he painted on them: Schrodinger's Equation Ĥ |Ψ > = E |Ψ >, Schrodinger's Cat, a graphical rendition of a wave-particle duality along the vamp*. Each of these elements relates to a fascinating quirk of Quantum Mechanics known as the measurement problem. This is seriously some super cool stuff – Neil deGrasse Tyson voice.
From my point of view, these shoes are both a thoughtful gift, and a piece of wearable art that references a grand philosophical-mathematical puzzle surrounding the nature of the Universe and what it means to observe something. For many others, these are just dilapidated Converse high-tops featuring a delightfully detailed drawing of a cat. Still, there are a lot of people who like cats these days so this works well, from an overall design standpoint, I think.
*vamp may or may not be a real word