When I first started reading academic papers when I was 12 or 13, I wondered who the hell Ibid was. Seemed a very smart person.
Then I quickly figured it out. But at first (mainly because I didn’t care about it or think about it very hard since I cared about the content*), I thought Ibid must’ve been some huge polymath.
My memories aren’t 100% clear, but I think the first scientific paper I read was a paper by Kary Mullis (et al.) on the Polymerase Chain Reaction. I’d helped my neighbor pass her college microbiology and other science classes when I was 9 and 10, so I already had some background in the area.
Still, it was the hardest thing I’d ever read. I remember struggling with it a bit. No way to Google back then. Unfamiliar words had to be searched out in dictionaries that often didn’t contain them at all. No adult where I grew up knew more than I did, so there was no one to ask.
I don’t regret anything, but I always wonder if I’d grown up somewhere else what my life would’ve been like.
*To this day, I sometimes literally don’t know the title or the authors of books I’m reading — while I’m reading them.
Ibid and Anonymous are two of history’s most towering time traveling immortal polymaths. :p
I don’t regret anything, but I always wonder if I’d grown up somewhere else what my life would’ve been like.
Would you have recreationally read the encyclopedia if you had access to it?
I did read it recreationally! In sixth grade, got in trouble for reading an ancient set in the classroom instead of paying attention to class. I think the encyclopedia set was from the 1960s. This was in 1990 or so.
That teacher (unlike my fifth grade teacher) hated me, but at least she ignored me pretty much after that and some other incidents.
My parents “shut up and take my money” trigger was education, so I was a 9 year old with an encyclopedia set. I’d pick up a volume, skim the pages randomly and start reading. I updated it every year for a couple of years; they were beautiful books. My parents also had a set of reference books for kids, including one on child developmental stages, so I was a kid giving my parents child raising advice. That worked as well as you might expect.