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This evening I went to the Royal Institution to see Ben Miller give a talk on his new book “It’s not Rocket Science.” It’s a fab building although the bar staff work very slowly, so no wine for us before the event started

I guess I had been expecting a lecture, whereas Ben was in fact being interviewed.

What really came through was his love of science to the extent I wondered how he’d been persuaded to abandon his PhD and go into the Footlights at all. There was a bit of regret there I think, although he did say very few people ever said “that’s a cracking experiment you’ve done there”, so it’s less rewarding on a daily basis compared to being on the telly.

Anecdotes (probably spoilers for the book) included

Getting into Cambridge after a question in the book “how to get into Cambridge” on chemical properties of squash and ping pong balls, that he read in the car on the way there, came up at the interview. (He ended up being accepted for chemistry then pleading for a physics transfer)
A longgg story on the dullness of clamp stands and giant three story high thermos flasks while doing his thesis. (novel quantum effects in quasi-zero dimensional mesoscopic electrical systems. He struggled to remember the whole title but described the electrons moving about crystals that he researched like a proper boffin.)
The teacher who got him excited about learning being special by not letting the kids do multiplication until they had their “times tables licence”
Telling Francis Crick (DNA scientist) about hallucinating when smoking a banana skin (at the time Crick was researching human consciousness, but was not as fascinated as Ben had expected!)
Being stitched up by Brian Cox on “Infinite Monkey Cage” by being sent to interview Jonathan Cainer. His segment started “Of course it’s complete bollocks! But as a way of understanding the human psyche..” and in the edit they cut out the “complete bollox” to make him sound like an astrology believer. There was however much Cox love as he popularises and gets people excited about science, so yay.
Having an obsession with school band names. If you were in a school band, Ben would like you to tweet him and tell him what it was called. At his school, there was a band called Section B (after the exam paper section), and he found the name marvellous

He also spoke of his admiration for Brian May for going back to finish his PhD later in life; and of being happy to have fluked the mass of the Higgs Bosum on an educated guess 6 months before the actual was discovered (by educated guess, before they went to print.)

Then he added iodine ions to hydrogen peroxide and made a huge foamy mess - and flailed when quizzed on the exact equation for the reaction…

There were some fascinated kids, also one bored and asleep one, and one who asked if there was more Primeval, to which the answer was “in Canada, with different actors” and “there may be a film in Hollywood.”

All in all a pleasant evening. I think Ben was pretty nervous, but he had a friendly and warm audience. Afterwards there was a book signing, but I headed for my train!