I often enjoy listening to a programme on the radio entitled The Life Scientific. It is broadcast on a Tuesday morning, and normally coincides with my driving to some climbing venue or another. It is my major attempt to correct my general ignorance of the natural sciences. There are two reasons why I like it. The first is that the scientists being interviewed come over as normal, likeable human beings. The second is that very often my imagination is stretched to its absolute limit. The presenter/ interviewer is called Jim Al Kalili, and he is evidently much more than your average journalistic hack, both in his familiarity with a very wide range of scientific issues, and his ability as an interviewer to get the best out of the exchange.
This morning’s subject was a Dutch scientist who is evidently a world expert on “astro-chemistry”. In other words, she is interested in using the data of astronomy as the raw material for chemical analysis. One point she made really caused me to wake up, namely, the idea that the vast majority of the water on earth probably didn’t come as ice from a passing comet (as is often hypothesised) but that at some stage the earth must have encountered a vast cloud of water-ice crystals in inter-stellar space. It seems there is a lot of it out there.
“How much?” asked Jim Al Kalili. “Oh, several oceans’ worth” was the reply. My imagination was working overtime at this point. I imagined it raining for a million years….and we complain about the English summer!