» This book changed my life

Dead and Alive
When I was 14, my dad handed me 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat' by John Gribbin. He'd been getting right into popular science books at the time, but this was the first he'd passed on to me to read - "It's great," he said, "you'll enjoy it."

And I did - I fucking loved it. The book itself was enjoyable by itself, but the concepts of quantum mechanics that it described were what really entranced me. It was all just so bloody weird, so amazingly different from anything I'd ever experience in the normal world. And what's more, it was all real - this is how the world works at a tiny level.

I enjoyed it so much that by the time I reached the last page, I'd decided that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. This is what I was going to go study at university and come to grips with. I wanted to truly understand it all.

So four years later, when it came to pick courses to study at university I made no hesitation - physics, physics and physics. I had pretty good grades, so I got into my first choice of uni and that's where I am now.

University, however, has been a different story. I've struggled, barely scraping the marks needed to stay on the course. It's the maths - the maths proves a constant barrier to a deeper understanding of it all. No matter what I do, it only gets more dense and obscure.

So that puts me here, a couple days before the start of my junior honours exams. I'm shitting enough bricks to rebuild Sichuan, and I'm staring down the barrel of a pretty crap degree. My nerves are wrecked, I can barely sleep and I want to be sick.

Do I regret it? No. I still love physics, though it's a pity it doesn't love me back.

Did the book change my life? Most definitely, though whether for better or worse remains to be seen.

Length- if it appears too long, you should probably go faster.
(Thu 15th May 2008, 23:56, More)