There’s a rich and long tradition of public discourse here in the UK known as “conversations with cabbies”. Taxi drivers, especially London ones, are renowned for their ability to combine blunt opinion with a kind of cosmic rumination.
“Whenever I hop into a cab and they say ‘what do you do?’ and I say ‘I’m a space scientist,’ usually there’s a double take because ‘oh, you don’t look like a space scientist,’” Dame Maggie Aderin-Pocock says, laughing and miming bafflement. “Then we have a conversation and there’s lots of questions: ‘I’ve always wondered about this,’ and ‘How about that?’ And it’s funny because that [interest in space] goes back through time, and every culture,” she adds. “It’s one of those fundamentals.”
Three decades into a career that has taken her from the Ministry of Defence to the Atacama Desert, and regularly beamed her on to TV screens, though not — yet — into space itself, Aderin-Pocock, 57, is quite used to smashing preconceptions. Over the past 21 years as a science communicator, she has given talks to “about 650,000 people”, including school kids, students, diplomats and world leaders. She will be adding thousands more this month when she delivers the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, a series of public talks inaugurated in 1825 by the English scientist Michael Faraday, at the charity’s historic Mayfair headquarters.