> I don’t think the intuitions necessary to do distributed computing well would come to someone who snoozed through physics

Yeah. I was a physics major and it really helped to have had my naive assumptions about time and clocks completely demolished early on by taking classes in special and general relatively. When I eventually found my way into tech a lot of distributed systems concepts that are difficult to other people (clock sync, indeterminate ordering of events, consensus) came quite naturally because of all that early training.

I think it's no accident that distributed systems theory guru Leslie Lamport had written an unpublished book on General Relativity before he wrote the famous Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System paper and the Paxos paper. In the former in particular the analogy to special relatively is quite plain to see.