On knowing when to read a book

Hans Christian von Baeyer's book "Information: The New Language of Science," has been gathering dust on my shelf for years.

Every time I took it out to look through it and read a paragraph or two it seemed far too daunting and likely to give me a headache before I got very far.

I was just waiting for one of those days when I felt "smart."

Everyone has them, times when for no apparent reason you seem to have a better sense of the world and where exactly you fit in than usual.

Happened last Wednesday afternoon so I started reading it and by artfully skipping parts that ordinarily would've forced me to put the book down, prolly forever, managed to drive on through to the end, which goes as follows (the final 2/3 of the final paragraph): "The qubit, which floats through my mind in the form of a soft, translucent sphere..., shimmering indistinctly in all the colours of the rainbow at once, is an inexhaustible source of possibilities from which only one can be realized. It is ripe with infinite surprise, for the bit is contained in it in an irreducibly random, unpredictable way. Grabbing the qubit, measuring it, and reducing it to a definite colour, or a comprehensible Yes or No, or a numerical zero or one, is an original act of creation on my part, undetermined by the past, irreproducible in the future. To me, the qubit is the ultimate source of wonder."

Earlier: "The burning question for physics has become: how come we don't notice superposition in everyday life? or: how are the superpositions of the world at its fundamental level disguised to yield the stark outlines of the world our senses perceive?"

As one  physicist whose name escapes me remarked, "And then a miracle  happens."

Table of contents here.

Preview the book here.