About me


How I Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Chemistry

My story

… is a still work in progress. In the meantime I will be adding some basic information about me and useful projects I worked on over the last years. There will also be parts unrelated to my (photo)chemical career.

The beginning

Perhaps unsurprisingly my affinity to chemistry didn’t start at school but rather at home. Already when I was a kid I liked reading comic books, novels, but above all encyclopedias which infected me with the desire to know more. Anything related to space, engineering and more broadly natural sciences was and still is to this day resonating with me in a way only a similar enthusiast can understand. When I was attending secondary school, I was always looking for the classes of physics and biology. But the real change came in the 8th grade. By this time I already had a few simple experiments under my belt. Things on the level of mixing baking soda and citric acid seemed at that time beyond cool, but the real breakthrough came in the 8th grade when the classes of chemistry started and suddenly the sky was the limit. We had a great teacher thanks to who I started to appreciating the omnipresence of chemistry which affects our daily lives. This realization also lead me to think about more complex experiments which could be done and after a while sole thinking was not enough and I started visiting pharmacies and drugstores to spent my allowance on various chemicals instead of chocolate and computer games. Well, thats not enrirely true, I had to ration all of these 3 areas carefuly. From today’s perspective getting compounds like calcium carbide, potassium permanganate or sulfuric acid was perhaps a bit dangerous for a boy of my age but the amount of fun and sometimes painful experiences I got was priceless.