How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S18, Ep9 Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock: one of Britain's foremost space scientists on belonging and the meaning of life

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

CW: miscarriage Maggie Aderin Pocock MBE is a space scientist, educator and broadcaster - and quite possibly the first How To Fail guest who has her own Barbie doll. Fascinated with space from an early age, she even built her own telescope as a teenager. Nowadays, she's the co-presenter of the long-running TV programme The Sky at Night, as well as being Chancellor of the University of Leicester and the first Black woman ever to win a gold medal in the Physics News Award. Her achievements are all the more admirable when you consider her upbringing: the child of divorced parents who found herself at the centre of a difficult custody battle, she changed schools 13 times in 14 years and struggled with lessons because of undiagnosed dyslexia. From an early age, she found refuge in the night sky, viewed from the rooftop of her council flat. She joins me to talk about her extraordinary life, as well as her failures in tidiness and punctuality - and what being a mother in her 40s has taught her. Plus: how difficult is it really to build a telescope? -- The Art of Stargazing by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, is published on 2nd Novemer and is available to order here. -- I'm going on tour! To AUSTRALIA, mate! You can now purchase tickets to see me live at Sydney Opera House on 26th February 2024 or the Arts Centre Melbourne on 28th February 2024. -- How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail] -- Social Media: Elizabeth Day @elizabday How To Fail @howtofailpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and

journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Maggie Adair in Pocock MBE is a space scientist, educator and broadcaster. Fascinated with space from an early age, she built her own telescope as a teenager. Despite changing schools 13 times in 14 years and having been diagnosed with dyslexia, she gained four A-levels before going on to complete a degree in physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering. She worked at the Ministry of Defence building missile warning systems and has helped design revolutionary space instruments, such as the Gemini observatory telescopes in Chile and satellites for the European Space Agency. Adairin Pocock also regularly visits schools to educate and inspire children, particularly girls, to pursue their interest in science.

to pursue their interest in science. This has prompted a successful television career, most recently as co-presenter of the long-running astronomy programme, The Sky at Night. Chancellor of the University of Leicester, she is also the first black woman to win a gold medal in the Physics News Award and has served as the president of the British Science Association. Her new book, The Art of Stargazing, is published next month. In it, she writes, I spent my teenage years growing up in a council flat in London,

but that did not deter me from looking up whenever I got the opportunity. Dr Maggie Yadarin-Pocock, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you so much. Lovely to be here. And actually, the problem with an introduction like that is it sounds so interesting. I've got a lot to live up to. I thought you were going to say it's riddled with inaccuracies. I feel terrible. You don't have anything to live up to. You're already living it. And thank you for the gift of your new book.

There are already so many people that I want to give it to because you write with such passion and also such erudition because you know everything. Oh, I so wish that were true. That's so not true. I want you to treat me as a total ignoramus and explain to me. Novice. That's better. Yes. Novice. What is a star? Oh, well, a star is, well, our local star is the sun. And it fuels everything here on Earth virtually. The stars are born in what we call nebula. So these are huge clouds of dust and gas. And what you do is you get sort of things that start bumping together.

You might have a star explode sort of nearby. And that causes a sort of a ripple and things start bumping together. And when things start bumping together, they sort of clump together and clump together and clump together. And then as the clumping happens, it starts swirling around and around. At the centre of the clumping, you get sort of a large mass forming. And now to put a star into perspective, our local star, the sun, you can fit 1.3 million Earth volumes into the sun. So the sun is absolutely massive. But what makes a star a star is what happens at the centre. Because when all this mass starts clumping together, what happens at the centre is it's super hot and

there's super amounts of pressure. And then a process called fusion happens. Now fusion is sort of like magic. It's governed by Einstein's equation, E equals mc squared. Really simple equation, but it says how a star creates energy. And it creates this energy because at the center of the star, you have huge temperatures, huge pressures. And what happens is atoms, like, let's say hydrogen, start colliding with each other at these high temperatures and pressures. And what happens is when they collide together, they form new elements. So you might get a hydrogen and a hydrogen, they sort of smash together to form a helium. And because of this E equals MC squared, and what you do is you have a tiny amounts of mass is lost when this fusion process happens. But that mass is multiplied by

the speed of light, which is 300 million meters per second, and then multiplied by the speed of light again. And so what happens is for a tiny loss of mass you get huge amounts of energy and that's why stars shine and they shine and they give out this energy in what we call the electromagnetic spectrum so it's from visible light you know the sort of things we see with our eyes infrared sort of heat energy uv that's why we have to wear suntan lotion but x-rays gamma rays all this radiation is burst out into the universe and sort of travels to us here on earth and gives us daylight and photosynthesis and sort of drives our whole ecosystems i wish you had taught me science i know that wouldn't be impossible given our respective ages but i am slack-jawed with how you've explained that in such an exciting way.

And I understand it. Actually, as a science communicator, that's the biggest thing. Oh my God, am I losing you? No, not at all. And I did single science UCSE. Can you imagine? So if you can get me to understand it, you're on to a winner. I find that such a beautiful concept that under pressure energy creates new things yes

and in a way that is the premise of this podcast because failure can sometimes feel like extraordinary pressure that we have to overcome what do you think space teaches us about failure I know that's a huge question but I wonder how space perceives of what is a failure in space oh well it's funny because this is in space and there's in science in general I talk about the scientific method the methodology of sort of doing science and the idea is you come up with a theory or a concept and then you sort of think okay how can I test that theory or concept to see if it's true and then you sort of might come up with a device experiments or things like that to test the concept and then you say okay yes the experiment agreed with my theory or it disagreed with my

theory and then you sort of go through that process again and the thing is with that process there is so many failures so many dead ends so many but we talk about the success yes we've done it we've found a cure for covid or whatever we found the vaccine but we don't talk about all the failures and the failures are critical because vaccine. But we don't talk about all the failures. And the failures are critical. Because without those failures, we don't know where the dead ends are. And it's like a tree diagram, you have to sort of fan out and then sort of narrow in on the success. So exactly the same in space. In space, we're very conservative. Space feels like sort of very cutting edge, you know, it feels like Star Trek and things like out there. But at the same time, because we launch something into space space and often we can't go and fix it

we try and make sure that everything we do out there in space has been tried and tested as a space scientist one of the things one of my horrors is because i suffered dyslexia i didn't how much paperwork is associated with everything you build because you need to have sort of that verification this has been tested and so before we actually put it out there, we vibrate things and we're pretty nasty to our equipment to make sure that it will work when it gets out there. Do you have a favourite star? Ooh, a favourite star? Yes. I think I'd go for Betelgeuse. It's in my favourite constellation, Orion. And Betelgeice is a sort of a red giant so it's nice and clearly visible in the sky that's one of the reasons i love orion so much it's got it's got

a lot going on in there beetlejuice is this sort of star and actually when you look at it it does look a little red in fact to be clear about it if you want to actually see stars quite well sometimes you don't look directly at them you You look slightly off them. Because the rods and cones at the back of our eyes, these are sort of receptors to pick up sort of a light. The colour receptors aren't really concentrated in the place where we actually look directly. And so if you look slightly off, you see it slightly better. But if you do see it, it is actually sort of quite red.

And it's this red giant. And it does weird things every so often so we don't really understand beetlejuice sometimes it dims everything why is it dimmed and it gets brighter again but it's really easy to see it in the night sky and it's a star we're still trying to understand so you like that idea of something being slightly beyond your understanding yes mysteries yes keeps me in a job i think as a scientist i love going out and speaking to kids and things i love to tell them is that people i think first that we've come a long way with science we've almost got it got it sussed and we haven't there are just so many mysteries

so many things we don't understand we only know what six percent of the universe is made of the other 94 we have no idea we call no idea. We call it dark matter. We call it dark energy. That's because we have, it's just dark. We don't know what it is. And so I love telling kids this because it means there are mysteries for them to solve. We could be stumped, but yeah, perhaps they'll come up with solutions

that we haven't found yet. Okay, so final question about sort of stars and constellations before we get onto your failures. The zodiac, I couldn't quite understand. How does that fit into it? Because it does have a basis in the actual constellations and the position of the planets. It does, yes.

So the zodiac, it's quite interesting because there's astronomy and there's astrology. And every so often people say, oh, I like you, you're the astrology woman. More astronomy. But I don't take offence at that at all because it really did start with astrology people were looking at the stars and people felt that you know the stars dictated their future

I think there's a long history of people trying to understand the future we do it today we just use algorithms and things like that but people try and predict the future and so the star signs on the zodiac are like a band that go around the equator and these are the stars. Constellation is quite complicated because in the past people used to talk about a celestial sphere so the earth was the center of the universe and around the earth there was this celestial sphere and on this sphere the stars were sort of projected. Now constellations don't really work like that because if you look at constellation like Orion some of the stars in Orion are quite close to us some of them are really far away but we just see them as a cluster and we've grouped them together like a dot to dot. But the stars of the zodiac are similar there's

someone far away someone close but they're a group of stars that sit around the equator and they are associated with dates of birth so something might be high in the sky in March and so that is the sign of the zodiac that you were born under. They are part of the constellations, but these are constellations that people have honed in on because they are the constellations that are associated with different star signs, depending on when you're born and what's high in the sky at that time. It's so fascinating. So do you think then that where stars are and the positions of the planets affect who we are because my sense has always been we're made i'm sorry again the single science is going to show itself now but you know we're made up as humans like 70 water or something and tides are influenced by

the position of the planets well maybe the moon and the sun okay the moon and the sun so so the position of the moon and the sun would affect our internal tides when we're born. Does that make sense? Because I find astrology a little bit of a stretch. Okay, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, but it's nice to explore. And so, because for instance, I mentioned our local sun, yeah, our local star, the sun. Yes.

And so 1.3 billion times the volume of Earth. If you go to the next door neighbor star that's 40 trillion kilometers away from us so 4.28 light years and if i was traveling with modern technology it would take me 76 000 years to get there and so these are just sort of uh bodies in space and so i think they have very very little influence on us it's always it depends because if you're going to the metaphysical people believe that that's the case but if we're talking about sort of scientifically it would be hard to justify how that thing trillions of kilometers away is having an influence on us here on earth okay that makes total sense yeah and also if you remember so

i was born in march so i come under the star sign pisces but the constellation of pisces is made up of a collection of stars that aren't together. Some are many, many, many trillions of kilometres away, some are closer. So they're not actually a collection of stars at all. It's just we've superimposed all those stars together to make a picture. So constellations themselves don't exist out there. It's just our projection of them or how we see them from Earth. We group those stars together, but they're not actually together at all. Oh my gosh, this is mind blowing. So much of our life is perception. Oh yes, it's a point of view really. So from Earth, we see the stars as we see them. If we went to another star system, our sun could be part of a constellation. So yes, it's all relative.

And I said it was my last question, I lied because I'm just finding this so enthusing. There's a bit in your book where you talk about the culture of ancient Egypt and how the stars affected the evolution of the ancient Egyptians. And it was such a beautiful way. But do you remember it? Because I'm back to it. It's where they believe that the stars caused the flooding. So they started looking at the stars and understanding what to do about the flooding. And that indirectly led to the building of the pyramids. Oh, yes, yes. Will you tell us that story?

Yes. The Nile, which runs through Egypt, is critical to life in Egypt because the Nile is a big river. And when it floods and when it recedes, it leaves in its delta and also around the river, it leaves fertile soil. And so the rising of the river and sort of the receding of the river is critical for life in Egypt. And so they knew that some tides are higher, sometimes the tides are lower, and it's partly governed by the sea. The sea is governed by the tides, which is the sun and the moon. So they realised that sort of the astronomy of the stars, the moon and things like that played a part in this role. And so they had the sun god Ra, who travelled across the sky every day. And that was their

pharaoh. And so all of these things were interlinked. And so they tried to understand, they tried to predict, is the river going to rise again? Is it going to be a good fertile year? So again, that's why they started looking at astronomy to predict the future. Astrology, astronomy to try and predict the future. And it became a critical part of their culture. So much so that when they built the pyramids, they aligned them to the stars they saw in the night sky. The gods were up there, sort of influencing us down here on Earth. Thank you so much, Maggie. I want to get on to your first failure because it's so beautiful.

And I think it will lead us into such interesting territory in terms that there's so much to ask you about your childhood and the phenomenal person that you are your first failure is about your difficulty with sleeping that you don't sleep at night I don't I'm totally insomniac I've always been an insomniac and I don't know why because yes growing up the rest of my family would sort of go to sleep and I'd sort of snuggle down and pretend to sleep. And I just can't. I don't know why. Even when I'm really tired and as I get older, I find that staying awake at night isn't really healthy.

I often have a sort of kick during the day when my daughter's gone to school. But I don't know, there's something peaceful and quiet. And I think it's a time I can call my own. There aren't any other distractions. It's quite interesting because I find book writing really hard. I think it's partly the dyslexia. I think I'm partly, I've got a bit of ADHD and I'm a terrible procrastinator. So I will leave writing until beyond the deadline when I have to do it. And I'll usually write at about three o'clock in the morning and it's quiet. I think, oh, I've done everything else.

There's no excuse. I've got to get this done. And so it's that time which I feel my own. That's sort of as an adult. But as a child, I didn't sleep either. And I'd wander around the house and it would be quite scary. Because when you're maybe four years old, everybody else in the house is asleep. When it's dark, things take on a sort of sinister countenance yeah the dressing

gown you hung up on the door looks like someone coming to get you and i think that's why i fell in love with the moon i always call myself as a self-certified lunatic the self-certification is very important yes often just being a lunatic i used to look out of the window and moonlight would come in and that beautiful warm silver light would flood the room and all the scary things would go away. And so the moon was my friend and it was my companion in these strange, lonely nights where I sort of wander around the house. Because it sounds like when morning came and you existed once again in daylight, your life was still quite confusing and maybe a bit scary. So changing schools 13 times in 14 years, I can't even imagine how stressful that must have been. What was going on for you at that time? Yes, it's funny because I go and do lots of school talks.

I've been mentioning I went to 13 different schools and one girl put up her hands, I've been mentioning I went to 13 different schools and one girl put up her hands how naughty were you I didn't realize I'd been to so many schools and my sisters didn't sort of clock up as many as I did so for me what happened is my parents split up when I was four. And so sometimes I was with my mum, sometimes I was with my dad. As we toed and froed in terms of the custody battle, I'd sort of go to different schools. And then at some schools, they would just close. I don't know, I didn't touch them. Some schools would just close, so I'd have to go on to another school. But yes, I hadn't realised. But I was doing a radio programme and someone was doing some research, and we wrote down the schools. And so sometimes I'd be at a school for't realised, but I was doing a radio programme and someone was doing some research and we wrote down the schools.

And so sometimes I'd be at a school for two years. Sometimes I'd be at a school for six months. I think kids are adaptable. I don't remember it being stressful. I think it's had an impact on me in different ways, some positive, some negative. I think in a positive way, it means I'm used to change. Change doesn't scare me that much. And I think that can be quite useful because the only constant is change. And I think I'm quite adaptable. I'm happy to sort of jump into a new situation or meet new people and things like that. But I'm not used to constancy. And so I have friends and it's intense, but then I sort of

move on because life takes me somewhere else. And I think I'm a bit of a chameleon in that way. Sometimes I'm frightened of meeting friends from the past because in my new environment, I'm a different person and they might not recognise that person. And I don't think I can go back to being the old person. And so I find life quite transitory that way. And it means I find it harder to sort of keep friendships. My husband has known people that he went to primary school with, but because of this sort of transitory existence, I think it's somewhere, yes, I find that harder. This is so fascinating. I have just written a book about friendship. And one of the passages I quote is from Nietzsche. And he has this terminology, star friendships, which is

absolutely about what you're describing. And I can relate to a lot of it that sometimes a friendship dazzles brightly in your orbit in the sky around you and sometimes it's further away in a galaxy and sometimes you move on but they will forever be part of your firmament and I found that a really helpful way of looking at it and how interesting that he picked the metaphor of stars but yes I think that's beautiful because yes it is just like stars some burn bright and beautifully but not for very long and then others are a slow burn and continue and maybe less intense but sort of lovely to have them there and yes i think that's beautiful actually yeah i'll send you the passage thank you not from me from nietzsche he does it much better than i do i don't see both actually. That's very kind. Did you feel, because often when we change schools and we have to be adaptable and we have to try and

strike up acquaintances, there's a sense that we don't feel we belong anywhere. So I want to ask you about belonging and how you experienced that as a child. Yes. So belonging, one of the appeals of space, because I've been fascinated by space since before I can remember. I can't remember a time where I wasn't fascinated by space and I didn't want to get out into space. That's been the driving force in my life. But it's quite interesting because with space, I think space appeals because growing up, I didn't feel I belonged anywhere. I think I'm quite British in the way I've been brought up and things like that. But I go to school, school in the 1970s, and kids pick on any differences and say you you don't belong here

why don't you go back home but I mean you live down the road what do you mean and also I'd never been to Nigeria so this was my home but then I'd go and meet relatives and they'd say you don't speak the language you've never been to Nigeria you're a lost Nigerian you don't belong to Nigeria you're not one of us so I didn't belong sort of locally I don't belong to Nigeria. You're not one of us. So I didn't belong sort of locally. I didn't belong to Nigeria. I just felt I didn't belong anywhere. I was just like slipping between the cracks. Space and Star Trek. And the clangers you loved as well, didn't you?

The clangers, yes. Because with space, when you look at planet Earth from space, you don't see barriers. You don't see borders. You don't see countries. You just see our planet. And also Star Trek reinforced that because it was a group of, know pioneers you know they deliberately had people from all over the world you know Chekhov from Russia Captain Kirk from America and Spock from Vulcan all these different

people coming together and working together that's one of the things I love you know together we can do the seemingly impossible and the other clangers they always have a special place in my handbag I always carry a clanger that's so sweet Maggie at my age it's slightly weird I'm going to take a picture of you with it later um but that idea of togetherness again there's a sort of sad beauty to it because your family must have not felt together in the way that you wanted it to be. Yes. And you mentioned a custody battle. That must have been tough. Yes. And see, again, it's sort of a...

You accept it. Yeah, your bills of resilience. And I think kids don't know it any different. When kids are growing up, they assume that everybody's going through the same thing. I was realising that other people had sort of more long-term friendships and things like that. I don't think I'm very good with stress. think I suffer from stress but I don't realize I'm

suffering from stress which can be very useful but then I think it comes out in other ways I can't remember feeling stressed I think I'm an optimist so yeah and so I think I don't remember feeling stressed about it but I think just because I wasn't aware of the stress doesn't mean it wasn't there yeah also I think yes it comes out in other ways and maybe in later life and things like that. I was talking to my mother quite recently and she was like, it's quite interesting because she was like, I was the one to the little. I was the sickly child because I was the only one that had asthma and I was the only one that had eczema and things like that. And so maybe the stress was coming out in those ways. Yeah. Well, I know we're going to talk a bit about how the stress might come out in your

next two failures but before we get on to that the telescope making okay how did that come about and how difficult is it to make a telescope I think probably easier than you might think okay so this is when you were a teenager that you made your first telescope yes as a teenager I used to watch things like the sky at night I wanted to get closer to the night sky. So I thought I'd get a telescope. But we were living in a cat's flat, not much money. And so I bought one from Argos, as it happened. It was just a little telescope and it had plastic lenses

and it was quite cheap and it didn't work very well. It suffered from something called chromatic aberration, which sounds weird. But what happens is, if your lenses aren't very good, as light passes through the lenses, what happens is the light gets bent by the lenses. But different colours of light will get bent by different amounts. So when you look through the eyepiece, what you do is you might see the moon, but you might see a sort of a green moon, a blue moon and a sort of a red moon, sort of slightly splayed out in the image. And so, you you know you've got cheap lenses and so I thought this isn't very good I want something better and then I was flipping

through a magazine and it said you know telescope making classes you know evening class at a local school in Camden I said you can make a telescope and so I went along I remember knocking on the door and sort of going inside the room and the average average age of the room was about 50. And I was about 13, 14 years old. And it was all white guys. And I was sort of like, ooh. But it's funny, I think that's the only time I noticed that when I sort of made that entrance. Because after that, we were just making telescopes together.

Making a telescope, what you do is you don't make lenses because if your light is passing through the lenses, you have to work both sides of the lens. Newton came up with this great idea well actually i think other people came up with it but newton came up the idea of a telescope with using mirrors and so what you do is you can make a mirrored surface but it has to be the right shape and the shape you need is something called a parabola because if you have a sphere what happens is the light comes in and then you get different focuses so you don't get a nice sharp image but if you have a parabola light from a distance comes in it comes to a nice sharp focus and so what you do is you take two pieces of glass and you put an abrasive powder

between them and then you just sort of rub them together and i used to sort of watch star trek and rub my two pieces of glass together and then what happens is you wear away naturally you wear away the center of the glass so you get one sort, which is sort of a concave and when one is convex and they sort of sit together and you can keep on working them. And then what you do is you put sort of a finer and finer powders in until you get sort of a smooth finish. And then you've got, you end up with a spherical surface. So then you have to work the centre to make it into a parabola. And then you coat it with some silver or aluminium so it's a shiny surface. You put it in a box with another little flat mirror and you've got a telescope now this did take well actually took me a number of years to make but it was a labor of love and yes and so

you sit there watching star trek grinding my telescope mirror it's quite interesting because it's quite an iterative process so when you're trying to make the parabola you sort of you rub the center of this telescope mirror but then the glass heats up and so expands and so when you're trying to make the parabola you sort of you rub the center of this telescope mirror but then the glass heats up and so it expands and so when you test it it isn't the right shape so you rub it and then you have to wait for it to cool and then you test it and think oh no you need a bit more or i've got a bulge over here so i need to work that bit you fettle the mirror you work on the different parts of it until you come up with this nice surface did it teach you about patience yes and i'm not a very patient person I'll be there you know I've done the rubbing and then test it no it's too soon oh wait wait wait perhaps I should put it in the fridge no Maggie wait.

So a judge had asked you which parent you wanted to live with and you chose your father which again that's a difficult thing to ask a child but I wonder what he made of his teenage daughter just working away at her parabola in front of Star Trek for years what did he make of your passion I think he took it in his stride I mentioned sort of I didn't feel much stress those are the times I felt the most stress ever. Having to choose between parents and also because effectively you're rejecting someone. You're rejecting someone you love. And also there's a whole lot of thought process that goes behind it. Oh, well, if I stay with dad, perhaps mum would be better off if she doesn't have to worry about me. Or perhaps I'm having an impact on dad's life. Perhaps I should be with my mum.

if she doesn't have to worry about me, or perhaps I'm having an impact on dad's life, perhaps I should be with my mum. It's nice that you're consulted, but the weight of that responsibility is very, very hard. Going back to the telescope making, my father realised, I think, quite early on that I wanted to be a scientist. In fact, he wanted me to study medicine, because I think when you're an ethnic minority kid, especially from Nigeria, education is the key. So when I was growing up, I think when I was five years old my father was saying what's your Oxbridge college will you go so he set the stakes high so education was a great leveler and also I think because he had girls he felt that we needed education because we lived in a biased world and we needed to be self-sufficient and that's one of the things I was definitely taught by both my mum and my dad,

self-sufficiency, be independent. And so that's sort of another driving force. This was part of the process of sort of getting the GCSEs, getting the A-levels. I think he hoped I was going to go and do medicine at another time of stress. It's funny, they're all coming out now. This is what we're about. But as we've discussed,

a stress and a pressure creates new energy. So how wonderful yeah i remember the day i told my father i didn't want to study medicine and i wanted to do physics and it was all physics it wasn't in the lexicon of what people did you became a lawyer you became a doctor you became an accountant maybe but yeah physics what's this physics stuff he knew what physics was because he studied it as a child and he was a teacher but the idea I wanted to study physics what's it leading to for me to the stars yes quite literally to the stars let's get on to your second failure which is that you are in your words pathologically untidy do you ever remember being any other way have you always been pathologically untidy

no I think it's just inherent the really scary thing is I see it in my daughter but I think she's taken it to another level the things I'm not the best influence on her. But I don't know, I've always been chaotic. I mentioned entropy. Entropy is a term we use scientifically, and it is a tendency to disorder. And I think that sums me up. I'm a chaotic. I like it about me, but it makes life harder in some ways. I don't know what happened during lockdown but our house went to rack and ruin just well it's funny because being at home it should have been easier to keep it tidy but it just went you're in it more yes I suppose yes yes but it's spending more time in it yeah and we're still fighting that now we can't invite anyone around because I'm still trying to clear up the

mess just things in the wrong place and too many things I do suffer suffer from that as well. Often I've worked as a project manager and a project manager is sort of a position of responsibility and sort of order, bringing order out of the chaos, which is not my natural tendency. I fight it. It's like fighting entropy. The universe has a tendency to disorder. So things go from sort of contained to disorder.

And so it was like that when I was a project manager, I would try and keep things contained and I'd try and keep the fighting system and I'd sort of get it all set up I said yes okay but then slowly but surely just dissolved into my usual chaos and it's chaos usually I can find quite a few things I mean because I know it's in that pile rather than in that pile and so there is a sort of a structure to it it's quite interesting because I wasn't actually diagnosed with dyslexia until after university until I didn't realize yeah so I didn't realize when I was at school I had dyslexia and that was quite interesting because I used to beat myself up a lot because you know why can't

I write this report other people can write the reports why do I find it so hard it's just because you're not trying hard enough Maggie try harder and so it's the same with the untidiness I try and keep order I set up structures to keep order I'm very good at that I love stationery and I'm always buying little notebooks to write lists and things like that I think Stanley Kubrick likes stationery so I always think we're in good company yes and so I try and keep order but yes it's just not my natural state is there something about the tendency to chaos that helps you or others create do you think yes and see that's it again it's the yin and the yang I think the fact that I am chaotic

means I have ideas all the time and I'm pursuing different things and I'm just trying to sort of yeah grapple with my problem is I have too many ideas and trying to pursue too many things like magpie hopping from over here to over here to over here. It's hard for me to stay focused. Although sometimes I get hyper-focused where I drill down. And that's how I think I write books as well. I put it off, I put it off, I put it off. And I throw myself into it and I won't do anything for about three weeks.

And I'm just in that zone where I'm writing and I'm writing and I'm writing. I think, oh yes, I'm enjoying this. This is wonderful. And then I sort of come out of it and think oh why didn't I do that earlier but I need that pressure I think it's like in the center of the stars to make the energy I need the temperature and pressure to be right so I can focus and get into it and when I'm in there I love it but it's almost like a black hole I fear going into it and I fear that when I do go into it the creativity might not there it might not work and so it's almost like a black hole I fear going into it and I fear that when I do go into it the creativity might not there it might not work and so it's almost I need that sort of that

pressure to actually sort of focus to get my mind sort of like churning and getting all excited about it there's this expression in therapy the fertile void and I always think that that's it's another way of saying black hole I I suppose. That idea that it is incredibly terrifying going into this blank space. Yes. And yet we need to take the leap and have faith that something will come out of it. Yes, yes. And I find that a lot. Because I have the ideas, but how do I go about it?

How do I speak to four-year-olds about space? And it's trying to find the right hawks and things to get them excited. And so, yes, it's leaping into that void. And when you're in there, is oh it's engaging enlightening it's just it's just wonderful place to be but it is that that leap of faith to get in well the other thing about chaos is that sometimes it can be another way of saying play like you're allowed to play and not live by these rigid rules and i i suppose i i'm obsessed with with Maggie as a child. I'm sorry, I'm going to go back to childhood.

Yes. Were you allowed to be chaotic in childhood or did you feel you had to assume the responsibility of an older person because you were trying to kind of keep things together? And I mean, I just, yes. Yes. So I think I was chaotic as a child.

One of the things it took me a while to realise is unfortunately my father lost his sight when I was about 15 16 about the time I was making the telescope actually my younger sister and I were living with my father so I guess I became a carer and I didn't really realize but I'd go shopping and I collect the money from his um disability yeah your disability and housing benefit and things like that and I'd go shopping and I'd look after the house. And it didn't seem odd, but I guess that would be defined as a carer. But it was only until recently I realised that.

And so I suppose in that way, I was still very untidy, but I had to try and bring order because there was the three of us and I needed to keep the three of us going. And so I suppose that's one of the phases where I think, OK, I have to focus. And I can do that, but I think okay I have to focus and I can do that but I think the house was still very untidy. Your father very sadly has now passed away but I wonder how much you think he was a formative influence on who you are and what you do? I think very much so but actually both my mother and my father oh I'm so sorry oh no no so

mother stood around yes importantly clarified that yes yeah but yeah my mum's alive and kicking and yes actually she's a force to be reckoned with and she was brought up in a sort of in Nigeria it's not quite a princess-like role I think went through quite much was childhood herself and ended up in the UK and she forged her own way and she's been a wonderful example of sort of strong female character in my life so I love that but my father was very keen on education, was very interested in the sciences and sort of nurtured that in me.

But yes, again, that's what independence sort of comes from both sides, I think. So yes, very, very formative. My father died two days before 9-11 happened. Oh gosh. And it was just a combination of his death, which came as a total shock. And then 9-11,

and I just felt the world's coming to an end. I can't understand this world. it just doesn't make sense anymore so yes it was um it was stressful very stressful and I once spoke to the author Raven Leilani who lost her family member during Covid and I think she lost more than one and part of what she said made the grief difficult was that it was just one of many and yet of course it was such an individual grief and an individual personal story and that must have been tricky to navigate too that you are mourning yes your father and then there's this whole other magnitude of loss where everything gets lumped together. Yes, the whole world blows up. And it was just trying to process my morning when there's a whole lot of other mourning going on and other hurt going on. And I think one of my other faults

is I like to run away. During COVID, I didn't listen to the radio or to the TV, because I think I empathize with things. And there was just so much pain, it was overwhelming me. I empathize with things and there was just so much pain it was overwhelming me and so I'd sort of okay I've got to look after the not look after the house but I've got to try and sort of block out that pain because and also hearing and also being ineffectual there's nothing I can do about it so I just sort of set up and sort of go batten down the hatches almost because otherwise I just get overwhelmed yes I felt like that too i wonder how your understanding of space has informed what you think happens to us when we die yes interesting yes space is vast it's just glorious in its bigness

so for an example of the sort of scale of space, I mentioned our sun, the local star. Our sun is in a galaxy called the Milky Way. And the Milky Way galaxy contains around 300 billion stars. So our star is just one of billions and billions out there. We're finding planets going around those stars called exoplanets. And we're finding more of them. But one of the things that the Hubble Space Telescope taught us is that in the whole of the universe, we approximate there are around 200 billion galaxies. So our galaxy, 300 billion stars, 200 billion galaxies out there.

So I believe there is life out there. I think it's conceited to think, you know, with all those planets, all those stars, why would life just occur here? The circumstances for life as we know it and life as we don't know it must occur out there. It's funny because I was brought up very religiously. We had an altar in our house. We used to say prayers every evening, sort of sit by the altar and say prayers. Religion just had some challenges for me. And I think I might have faith, but religion is a different, religion can be easily exploited.

Yes. As scientists, we look for evidence, we try and justify our statements. In religion, it's all have faith, believe, and that can be so easily exploited. And I actually saw that with my father. I think towards the end, he was finding things hard, but he was donating 10% of his money to a church where he couldn't afford that. And so, yes, I think it can be exploited. But at the same time, I was brought up very religiously.

And so when I think of my demise, when I think of what my idea of heaven is, it's not a white guy in a cloud. It is more getting the answers to all the questions that I've ever asked. It's almost like joining the universal mind. Again, it's sort of coming in with these aliens and things like that.

I love the idea of the harmonizing of minds that we all just join the universal mind and we just get access to information across the universe so oh so that's what dark matter is oh so that's what you know and then oh so maybe there is a god or something like that but just a sharing of knowledge because to me that's power and so yeah that's my idea of heaven now. So profound. It's power and it's also bliss. Yes. Everything is connected.

You make sense of everything. Yeah, I love the idea of we're all connected. We are not isolated. We're not sort of a standalone. It's letting go of ego, which I think I'd find hard. But I think by doing that, by becoming part of the, gosh, it sounds like Star Trek and the Borgs. I'm so into it. I've been assimilating.

But to be part of that and sharing that, especially in its thoughts, emotions, all that, to share on a universal scale. There's this wonderful woman called Jill Bolte-Taylor who suffered a near fatal hemorrhage, brain hemorrhage and stroke. And she survived it. And she was a neuroscientist and became a neuroscientist. Once again, she had to relearn everything. She lost all of her memories, all of her knowledge. And she gave an incredible TED talk, where she goes back to the moment where she realized what was happening to her that she was having a stroke and she describes very vividly this moment where she suddenly realized she was looking at her hand as she was on the phone to the ambulance and she suddenly her hand became multiple molecules and she suddenly had this glimpse into nirvana and an understanding of the connection of everything

in the universe and so hearing you talk makes me think that maybe that is what's on the other side. Right. Yes. I suppose that is the being starved of oxygen and sort of the transition. Yes. Maybe a sort of an input into what might lie beyond. I'd love that because some people believe there's nothing and that might be the case. But I think I find it more heartening to think there is something beyond. And that's what I'd like to be beyond. And I also think the evidence suggests that it's less likely that there's nothing. Oh, right. Yeah.

I think it's likely that there's something because we're surrounded by something. Oh, yes. Our whole lives are something. There's so much, as we've discussed, there's so much matter everywhere. Anyway, that's a whole different podcast. But I've loved this digression into profound philosophy. Yes, I know, I love it. Okay, your third and final failure is that you have a tendency to be late for everything. Apart from this podcast today, you were very impressively

early. Oh, but people talk mitigation. People know my reputation reputation and so just sort of shift the time there's current time there's Maggie time let's give her a bit more I have some insight I went to a literature festival a number of years ago and someone was talking about optimism and it struck me that I think my lateness is due to optimism because I always think things will work out well and so there might be traffic but now it'll be fine also because I'm firing on all cylinders all the time I think oh well I might do that there's five minutes I think the traffic's going to be okay well and I've built a bit of contingency but I'll use a bit of that contingency to do this and so I gobble away at the contingency

because I think well it's contingency and I try and get it into my mind you know some people set their clocks half an hour earlier because I could do that but I know it's half an hour earlier and so I'd eat into that contingency and I think it's just because I want to try and get so much done and I don't know what drives me to do that when I was growing up I used to think it might be quite nice to be one of those people who are just not driven not always wanting to do something always wanting to do more listen to your interview with sarah pascoe and she said she wanted to be doing things yeah it went into her 70s now i'm following david adambrow i won 90s yeah i want to be still active

and doing things and it's that feeling of being driven and it's like getting into space that's something that drives me and i think i need to be driven i need those things those goals it might be quite nice if I wasn't if I could just sort of sit back relax and think is that the ultimate ambition for you to get into space in some capacity that has been yes I can't remember a time I didn't want to go into space I remember looking at books and seeing astronauts and so sort of just that whole desire in sort of 1969 the moon landings happened I was too young to remember because I was born in 1968 but I remember that idea and I think the whole world was so caught up in moon landings and people are out there and so I wanted to be part of that and I always say sophisticated people grow out of such grandiose ideas but no I

still want to get out there why has it not happened yet I feel like it must be conceivable that we can get Maggie into space actually yes well it's funny because one of the reasons I started doing sort of tv was because I thought well maybe if I'm more prominent maybe that'll sort of get me into space and NASA is talking about sending people back to the moon with the Artemis project because 12 people have been to the moon and have been white and male and all from America and so yes I saw I'm black I'm female I've got dyslexia I'm not American hey NASA you're a shoo-in yeah I think there might be quite a few other people yeah fitter people and when Tim Peake became an astronaut I applied at the same time

and I've met him a number of times and he's lovely but I was all ready to hate him he's done my job but he's just too lovely it's unfortunate but he can put in a good word for you as well I definitely believe it's going to happen and I will be so excited for you when it does I can just I can feel I can feel the thrilled nature of your vocabulary when you talk about it like the energy it's funny because william shatner the guy who played captain kirk in star trek he went what he was 90 so i've got to do all of the things you need to stop being late i was late for my wedding and i was actually at the venue but that's because the telephone didn't work but i imagine imagine missing my rocket launch i was just finishing stuff off how late were you for your wedding i think probably about half an hour oh poor martin but i was told that someone would call

when i had to come down and so i was sort of you know waiting and the phone didn't work and we didn't realize so no one called well talking about your wedding and your husband and your lateness sort of brings us on to motherhood. Because in some areas of society, one might say that you were late to motherhood. I think, yes, I was. How old were you when you had your baby? I was 42. It was one of those things that I didn't think it was going to happen. Did that make you sad? Yes. I think kids are amazing. I love

going out and speaking to kids because they give you a different viewpoint on life. I think everybody should interact with kids as much as possible. And also I think we underestimate kids. I remember as a child people always thought, yeah, I know a lot more than you think, especially with sort of going through sort of the breakup of my family and things like that and I was sort of far more aware than people thought I was I like to try and treat kids with respect because I think they know more than we we realize because to me that is the ultimate to have another human being and to shape and influence them and to try and sort of develop them to be a sort of a person sort of ready for humanity really seems like the ultimate adventure and also something that you can't plan for there's no guidebook each one is an individual it's the

mystery again yes yes I think so but also just the loveliness of it yeah we debated whether we should have kids and we tried for a while and it didn't look as if it was going to happen and I remember saying that at 40 I'm going to cut this off because I think I have quite an obsessive nature. It's like falling into the black hole again. I can find it all consuming and I won't do anything else and I'll just get going. And it's getting totally obsessed with something

you don't have control over. And so I feared that and I feared that it would overwhelm me and depress me and take me to a place where I didn't think I should go so I decided at 40 I would stop trying and when you were trying was that trying naturally or you it was naturally yes yes and the thing is I feared the IVF route because I didn't know again out of my control and I think it's that knowing me as I do I think that would have taken me to a dark place yeah you would have been making syringes and like I know and sort of and scanning the internet and oh yes what's it I must take this vitamin and this vitamin this

and maybe this combination and then and yes just sort of yeah and so um just before my 40th birthday I fell pregnant and it it was gobsmacking. I didn't believe it. And it was just sort of, you know, when you hold that pregnancy thing. And it happened, but I had a miscarriage. I'm so sorry. But if it hadn't have happened, sorry, the retrospector escape, where everything is. I love that phrase.

Retrospector escape. A friend of mine told me, and I think it's just brilliant. It sums it up. The retrospector escape. So good. Because you're using the retrospective. If I hadn't fallen pregnant then, I would have given up. Yes. But I realised it was possible. And so that opened up a world of possibility. And then I fell pregnant again with my daughter and had when I was 42. And the miscarriage was horrible. Because it was sort of I I thought, oh my God, my crazy dream, it was coming true. And it was a crazy dream because I didn't think it was going to happen,

but it felt as if it could. And then I got pregnant and I thought, oh yes, okay. But yes, I'm glad it did happen because otherwise I wouldn't have my daughter today. What do you think being a mum in your forties and now early fift what has that taught you is there a gratitude there that actually it didn't happen earlier actually yes yes and it's funny because one of the things is I was quite established when my daughter came along and I made some quite radical decisions in my life because she was coming along and it's funny because when I realised I was pregnant, and the thing is, the fear of miscarrying again was terrifying. I used to get a monitor and listen to her heartbeat.

I was invited with the United Nations to go out to Syria. This is before the travels, actually just before the travels, to give talks to kids. I went out there, but I was quite heavily pregnant. And I used to take the monitor every night. And I remember one day we went out for an evening meal and I was dancing. And I got back and said, what am I doing?

I'm pregnant. And oh my goodness, I don't know if I can hear the heartbeat. What have I done? And just that guilt of the fear of doing something wrong. Again, having her when I was older, when she first came along, I thought, okay, I'm a space scientist. What I'm going to do is, yeah,

I'll stay at home for a bit of maternity leave. After probably six weeks, I'll go back to work. She'll go to nursery. I'll continue with life. But when she was born, that was totally different. I think it just felt like a blessing, a miracle having her at 42. And I wanted to be with her constantly and look after her. The maternal instinct was like a kick to me because it came out. I knew I was fairly maternal, but I was far more maternal than I realized and so I wanted to be with her constantly and one of the weird things that happened is two days after she was born I got an email from the

BBC asking if I wanted to make a documentary about the moon I'm a lunatic yeah I want to make a documentary but I have just had a baby and so the BBC paid for my husband to come with us so he'd look after her while I was filming. And so we got into this regime that I would travel and work. And my daughter would come with me. So the first four years of her life, she'd travel everywhere with me. And she was really gutted when she went to school. You know, I can't go.

As a space scientist, I was working long hours. As a science communicator, I was trying to fit the science communication in around the space science. And that was quite stressful because it was just juggling too many balls at once. And so when Laurie came along, I wanted to be with her. I set up my own little company, Science Innovation. And it was a back burner. I was working sort of full time, but doing this as a part time thing. But because it was established, I decided that I would just work for Science Innovation and be able to sort of take my daughter with me everywhere and so I stopped doing space science I do a bit of consultancy every so often because by doing the science communication I used to take on stage with me

and there's some videos of me I think at the one institution where she's in my arms and I'm talking there's a picture of me up on the screen and she says mummy and it's mummy but the only thing is you know the sponges on microface yes she's still pulling them off and eating them but i just loved having her by my side all the time and i guess also because you're an insomniac it kind of equipped you for those nighttime fees that you're perfect perfect mother figure actually yeah and i'll stay up at night with her and then sort of snooze in the day I wasn't a regular person anyway. So the irregularity didn't have much effect on me. And I kept on working throughout, actually.

So she's 13 now. Is she into space? Yes. It's funny because people often ask her that. Are you going to be a space artist? That's such an annoying adult question. Well, I understand why people do. But I always say, you know, I want her. Always when I go out to kids, I say, reach for the stars, no matter what your stars are. I literally want to travel to the stars.

But your stars could be anything, anything your heart's desire, anything that makes your heart sing. And so I want the same for her. Space was what got me excited, but I want to find what excites her. And I haven't found it yet. I think I'm quite lucky that I got that bug when I was so young and it's carried me through. She's still searching for hers, but we just came back from the telescopes in Chile, the VLT, the very large telescopes.

That you helped build? No, not those ones. So I built an instrument to go on the telescope. Okay, single science day here. Oh no, no, no. That's just some information. Some people thought I actually worked on the telescope. So I worked on the telescope so i worked on the telescope but on instrumentations that go to the telescopes so nothing to do with single science

i think your scientific knowledge is quite impressive sorry see this is me i said oh yeah that takes me out of it because it's funny because people think as a space scientist that i know everything of course I don't I have a fixation with science that that's what I call my shiny bit that's my passion in life but you you've brought so much out of me just by your questions and sort of exploring together and I'm taking so much away from our conversation so you see we have things that we're good at and we excel at and so thank you thank you for saying that what a beautiful thing we're both explorers I suppose. Yes. But you're an explorer of the mind.

Yes. And it's funny, if I wasn't a space scientist, I think I'd be a neurologist. Because I think the mind, how many billions of neurons do we have in our minds? Again, I've left. No, I love it. I loved it so much. You were taking Laurie to Chile. Yes.

And we went to the telescopes. Thank you. We went to the telescopes. And she was saying, after we came up from the telescopes, I'm 98.7% sure I want to be an astronomer. But I think that's when we're up at the telescopes. And I just want her to do something she loves. People say that that's what you say now,

but given later, it might all change. I don't think so. Because we spend so much time at work, why not do something you love? I think, and I'm lucky to have found that. Well, we're very lucky to have found that well we're very lucky that you found it too and that you communicate this knowledge this beautiful enthusiasm to the rest of us I cannot overstate how much I have adored this conversation with

every fiber of my being I feel like we could go on for hours, hours and hours and hours. Like satellites just pinging off. I can't thank you enough for trusting me and for coming on How to Fail. Dr Maggie Adair and Pocock, thank you. It's been a joy. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently, it helps other people know that we exist.