Thursday evening saw the annual Michael Faraday Prize Lecture at the Royal Society, this year entitled “Stones from the sky: A heaven-sent opportunity to talk about science”. The Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize is awarded every year to a scientist or engineer born in, or native to the Commonwealth, for science communication. The prize has been awarded since 1986 and the list of past winners is a veritable Who’s Who of well known scientists including Robert Winston and David Attenborough.
As well as a cheque and a medal, the winner is invited to give the annual lecture at the Royal Society, and tonight’s speaker was the 2011 winner Professor Colin Pillinger, FRS, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Open University. It was his work on meteorites from Mars which may hold evidence of life once having existed there that led him to conceive the Beagle 2 project and his prize lecture touched briefly on that topic.
Perhaps as befits a prize-winning science communicator, however, the lecture was not solely based on his own work, but was really a story of the history of meteorites, richly illustrated with details of the people involved. His tale started in the 1700s with meteorites falling, but not being taken seriously, let alone believed to be from space. This was despite several notable individuals witnessing meteorite landings and taking and interest. The tide turned in 1795 when a large meteorite now known as the Wold Cottage meteorite landed in a field in the hamlet of Wold Newton, Yorkshire, on the land of Edward Topham. Edward Topham was a public figure, with titles including poet, magistrate and newspaper owner, and his not inconsiderable PR skills undoubtedly came to bear on the significance with which the meteorite landing was treated. Professor Pillinger described how Topham was sitting for a portrait at about the same time as then the president of the Royal Society Sir Joseph Banks, who, comparing samples from the Yorkshire meteorite with rock from an earlier meteorite shower in Sienna, Italy, decided this phenomenon should be investigated and set a young chemist, E.C. Howard to work on analysing samples.
From then on, Professor Pillinger took us on a tour of how science, even in the modern day, is often about detective work. He recounted the deductions they had made in trying to determine the origins of the Lake House meteorite, a stone which in the 1990s was handed into the Natural History Museum, having stood as a barely noticed ornament by the front of Lake House for a century. The detective work included photos of the stone outside the house in a 1908 issue of Country Life magazine! The stone was later shown to be the oldest and largest meteorite ever found in Britain and the mystery of its origins is still unclear, with the leading hypothesis that it fell onto a glacier before the most recent Ice Age.
But meteorite science is much more than stories from the past, as Professor Pillinger made clear with his discussion of the Beagle 2 mission and discussion with the audience afterwards on how exactly how you identify a meteorite as Martian anyway (the answer: analyse the gas trapped inside it and compare to the Martian atmosphere). As with so many space-based projects, the ultimate goal is surely the search for life elsewhere in the universe, and while Professor Pillinger only briefly discussed it, the Beagle project will surely not be the last we hear on this topic.
The talk was well attended, with the large lecture theatre at the Royal Society almost full, but if you missed it, Professor Pillinger’s talk was also webcast and the video should be available in the next day or two. You can see that and previous talks from the Royal Society at https://royalsociety.org/royalsociety.tv/
Professor Colin Pillinger was delivering the annual Michael Faraday Prize Lecture at the Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London. The Royal Society holds regular events: for full listings, see https://royalsociety.org/Events-Diary/ You can see a list of more scientific events in London on Nature’s calendar at https://blogs.nature.com/london/2011/05/17/scientific-events-calendar.