Soon we’re turning off the dual carriageway and I see a jumble of buildings squeezed into a gap in the hills. ‘Here we are,’ says Ms Edgecombe.

‘It’s huge,’ I say. The university looks like a small town. It even has road signs directing traffic to the different departments.

‘First time you’ve ever been here?’

I nod, staring at the looming concrete buildings. ‘First time I’ve been to any university.’

She smiles. ‘I think you’ll like it, Meg.’

Once we’ve parked, Miss leads us across the campus and I try to take in every detail: the sweeping lawns, the groups of students, the church that’s shaped like a circus tent. We pass a girl sitting on a wall, totally absorbed in a book. She’s all alone, but she doesn’t stand out or seem at all bothered. In fact, as I look around I see there are loads of students on their own.

I feel more at home at this huge university than I do at school.

A PhD student called Jolina meets us in the reception area and takes us to a door secured with a keypad and plastered with WARNING and DANGER signs. She explains that she’s going to give us a tour of a research lab. ‘Is anyone here interested in quantum mechanics?’ she asks. ‘Because that’s my passion.’

Jolina is young, she’s wearing skinny jeans, she’s got a tattoo of a flying swan on the inside of her wrist … and her passion is quantum mechanics. I put my hand up, suddenly not caring that everyone has turned to stare at me. ‘I love quantum mechanics,’ I say.

Jolina smiles. ‘Good,’ she says, ‘then you’ll like it in here, because we’re trying to build the world’s first quantum computer.’

The lab is quite simply the most amazing place I’ve ever been in my life.

It’s dark and crammed with lasers, computers and a mass of wires that twist across the ceiling and walls. Heavy plastic curtains divide the room into sections and a deep sucking noise echoes constantly throughout the lab.

‘That’s cooling the ions to minus two hundred and sixty degrees,’ says Jolina, raising her voice to be heard over the machine. ‘I don’t really notice the sound now.’

She stops by a computer and points at the screen. ‘This is an atom I isolated this morning.’ She says this casually, like she’s talking about a cup of tea she made.

We lean forward and stare at the single fuzzy dot. Ms Edgecombe laughs. ‘I never thought I’d see an atom!’

‘Does anyone know how small this little thing actually is?’ asks Jolina. No one speaks so she looks straight at me, the girl who ‘loves’ quantum mechanics. ‘Do you know?’

I do, sort of. And because I feel like we’re in my world now, where being fascinated by quantum mechanics is normal, I clear my throat and start to talk. ‘There are three thousand million, million, million molecules in a drop of water,’ I say, ‘and each one of those molecules contains three atoms.’ Jolina nods so I carry on. ‘If you know there are around five sextillion atoms in a drop of water, you can almost understand how tiny that atom is.’