Physics Studies Hell

September 2014. Every morning, I would wake up at quarter to six to shower, have breakfast, and then make my way to Harsum, where the train to Hannover departed. From Harsum, I would either take the bus or my mother would drop me off there on her way to work in Algermissen. If she worked at different times and couldn't take me to Harsum, I had no choice but to take the bus.

Unfortunately, my semester ticket didn't cover free travel. It was invalid for the bus ride to Harsum. Therefore, every time I took the bus, I had to spend three euros on a ticket, which fortunately I could pay for with my BAföG. Not much was left of this money, as I used it to help my mother pay bills and debts when finances got tight. I could have used my sister's bike instead of the bus to save some money, but I was too lazy for that.

All the lectures and tutorials usually lasted until the afternoon. To avoid waiting an hour for the bus in Harsum on the way back home, I worked on the four weekly problem sets in linear algebra, analysis, experimental physics, and theoretical physics until eight o'clock in the evening in the university library. I hadn't attended the introductory week for freshmen and therefore wasn't part of any of the study groups that had formed during the week.

I didn't dare to ask any of the groups if I could join. I was once again in an introverted phase, probably because the unsuccessful search for an apartment had left me feeling down. So, I worked alone most of the time, or sometimes with Niels.

My mother finished her late shift at nine o'clock and picked me up from Harsum. From early morning until late evening, I was at the university. At home, after dinner, I continued to work on the problem sets until late into the night, yet still couldn't manage to finish them. I just felt too dumb for it, and my head felt like it was about to explode. My mother would come into my room and remind me to go to sleep when it was already midnight. The lectures started again at eight the next day, which meant I had to get up at quarter to six again.

With each passing day, an unfamiliar pressure built up, which was difficult for me to cope with. While the professor was already discussing new topics, I was still stuck on the old ones, trying to understand them correctly.

The whole situation led me into hellish stressful situations that I had never experienced before, especially not in physics class. This was not how I had imagined studying physics. I wasn't alone in this - Niels was also showing up less and less at the university and soon dropped out of the physics program.

My strength was slowly fading, and the enjoyment of physics was waning. I started skipping the problem sets and lectures and preferred to stay at home. Instead, I played ranked games in League of Legends, trying to climb to the Diamond rank to be among the top 1.5% of players worldwide. Or I watched Let's Plays of the best players.

This way, I isolated myself from the outside world, just like before. Every time I started the game or a Let's Play, I felt noticeably more introverted as if on cue. Thinking back to the last social interactions, like approaching a girl on the street, brought a sense of embarrassment, and I thought I should have avoided those interactions.

However, there were also phases where I hit roadblocks in League of Legends. On those days, I tried to work on ideas that had occurred to me during lectures where I wasn't fully engaged anyway. For example, I noticed during a mathematics lecture that multiple synonyms and notations were used for the same thing. This led me to believe that I didn't fully understand something, even though I did. I just lacked knowledge about that specific synonym or notation.

This had often been the case in school without me noticing. This prompted me to develop a unified notation on days when I couldn't progress in League of Legends, aiming to make communication in physics and mathematics more understandable and unambiguous. So, I started to clearly define all the terms and notations I encountered at university to avoid unnecessary variation for the same concept.

Thus, I ventured into something no mathematician in the world would dare, and devised a completely new notation for the summation and product symbols that had existed for centuries. This summation symbol became ubiquitous in my videos and on my website since then.

I also modernized the periodic table of elements, something probably no chemist would ever dare. I standardized all the element designations to match the element symbol and no longer require translation into English. For example, Hydrogen (H) became Hydrogenium (H). Boron (B) became Borium (B). Carbon (C) became Carbonium (C). Nitrogen (N) became Nitrogenium (N). Neon (Ne) became Neonium (Ne). Titanium (Ti) became Titanium (Ti), and so on. Aluminum (Al) naturally remained Aliminium (Al).

I felt very lonely during this time. Whether at home, in university, or in the cafeteria, I spent most of my time alone. I longed for someone who would make me feel safe, someone who would embrace me and encourage me with motivating words not to give up. Someone with whom I could fall asleep or just do something to distract myself. The more desperate the physics studies made me, the more I felt the urge to find that one person. A brightly painted note hung on the wall above my desk in my room, stating: "Goal: find my soulmate."

At that time, I held the view that the universe was entirely deterministic. Everything was predetermined. My actions were seemingly self-determined. Everything I supposedly did by free will was merely a consequence of the previous state of the universe. So, my future was already set and could possibly be revealed in the present through a horoscope.

Therefore, when skipping university, I would look at various horoscopes and examine which had the best predictive power. Every day, I compared the daily horoscope statement with my experiences. Erika Berger's horoscope seemed to be the best, especially because I could enter my date of birth there. To confirm my suspicion, I looked for volunteers on Facebook to find out if this horoscope worked as well for other people.

Only four out of twenty people who participated had their experiences accurately predicted by the horoscope. I was one of those four people. And although there was no rational reason to trust the predictions after this experiment, I still got into the habit of checking Erika Berger's horoscope daily to find out if I would meet my soulmate today. And one day, it finally happened...