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Theo announced at the desk. The nurse looked at him oddly then went off, returning with a shoe box containing many tiny ­containers, and the one large Coke bottle. Theo picked up the bottle and left. I have no idea what the nursing staff thought, but I found this very funny and still smile when I think back. My jokes weren’t malicious, but you wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of them.
    Another memory from undergraduate days is of an experience that, for a short time, shook myatheism. I went into some detail about this in an interview withScott Stephens for the ABC program Compass . He asked me if I believed in God and I said I didn’t because, as a physical scientist, I needed evidence to support my beliefs. But I admitted to having moments of questioning whether there might be a god.
    The most bizarre of these was the experience that occurred when I was in my undergraduate years at Adelaide University. I woke up one morning and had really ­swollen feet. I couldn’t stand on them; I was in a dreadful state. I couldn’t get to university and I was sitting there thinking, What the hell am I going to do? Later that morning I opened a Bible that was there in the boarding house and the first words I read were ‘King Asa was diseased in his feet, and he cursed God’. And I thought, How many references to feet are there in the Bible? What is the statistical probability of opening the Bible and reading about feet when you’ve got a problem with your own? A miracle, if you like, and I was shaken.
    Scott asked me if I’d prayed at that moment and I said that I might have, but the fleeting feeling of the existence of a god faded quickly, and my atheism reasserted itself. I now see the event as just an improbable coincidence. The problem turned out to be a case of chilblains.
    * * *
    My undergraduate career at theUniversity of Adelaide ended not with a whimper but with a bang. As a final-year honours project, I aimed tocreate a hologram. It would be Australia’s first. This was ambitious; optics was not a field ofphysics of particular interest to the Adelaide department, which specialised in other areas like space, atmospheric and solid-state ­physics. But I was intrigued by the idea of a three-dimensional image, suspended in space, which could be captured in time and frozen as an exposure on a glass photographic plate. There were technical problems, to do with the slowness of the only available high-resolution red-sensitive film, which meant that a three-hour exposure time would be needed in conditions of utter stillness. Any movement of a millionth of a ­centimetre would destroy the process and you didn’t dare breathe while the experiment was running. The only place it could be ­conducted was in the seismic vault—a chamber built deep in the basement and specially designed for seismological measurements. I had permission to use it and the best time to do so was on a Sunday night, when traffic outside was at a minimum.
    After a good number of failures I was getting somewhere, but time was running out and the exams were ­looming. On the last Sunday night that the vault was available to me, I found the door was locked. I was alone and enraged. I was also damned if I was going to let a housekeeping glitch (and it might’ve been more than that because there were people who weren’t happy with this use of the vault) thwart my experiment.
    I gave the door a huge frustrated kick and it flew off its hinges. Surprisingly, I didn’t hurt my foot and I later reflected that this must be what happens when karate practitioners break bricks with their hand—that if what you strike gives way, you don’t feel the pain of the impact.
    The experiment was a success—the image was captured and I was briefly the hero of the department. Everybody visited the lab to view the image. There was one ­anxious moment: someone dropped the glass plate and it broke into