Wonder, again

It has been snowing for the past few hours. As I looked out the window I could see snowflakes falling in a streamlined yet somewhat random motion, illuminated by the street lights. It's only a couple of days since it snowed last and yet seemed so new to me. Wish I had eyes of E. M. Purcell:
"I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep - great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth’s magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery."
(Nobel lecture, 1952)

A Day in 2001

As far as I could remember I was either bunking or deliberately delaying one of my Physics classes in high school- that was year 2001. I liked Physics always, but somehow the very idea of memorizing definitions written down in bold faced words never excited me. I hated high school Physics text books, I hated my teachers pointing out which definitions were important for exam. But I loved Physics.
I used to start reading any book in library without really looking into what it was and if I didn't like first few pages, I would throw it away and take another one. On that day I started reading a book, not a thick one, that described something really really weird. It talked about an electron gun firing electrons that fly to hit a screen through two holes, like the Young's double slit experiment. Now the author writes -- if someone looks at the holes to figure out whether the electron flew though hole no. 1 or hole no. 2, then the distribution of electrons on the screen is like what is expected from say, bullets fired at the screen through two holes. But, if nobody looked at the holes -- and the electrons left no clue whatsoever which path it took to reach the screen, the distribution of the electrons would be something like a wave, an interference pattern on the screen!! That was really strange, why should the electron care if I look at it or not? I was in a state of shock. I looked at the name of the author -- somebody called Richard Feynman and the book was the third volume of his 'Lectures on Physics'. My destiny, at least for next nine years so far, was fixed at that moment -- I wanted to become a Physicist, I wanted to know and understand this miraculous world of Quantum Physics.
Now after so many years, after revisiting that Lecture on Physics volume III so many times, after almost accepting the truth of Quantum reality as learned from text books, I 'looked' at the atoms in our experimental set up. Certain signal on our control interface shows the three trapped atoms are in a state which cannot be explained by anything but the Quantum Physics and I wondered -- "Is this real?".