S18, Ep9 Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock: one of Britain's foremost space scientists on belonging and the meaning of life

0:13Hello 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 Adairn-Pocock, MBE, is a space scientist, educator and broadcaster. Fascinated with space from an early age, she built her own telescope as a teenager.

0:55Despite 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. Adair and Pocock also regularly visit schools to educate and inspire children, particularly girls, 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.

1:41Chancellor 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 Adair and 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.

2:19I thought you were going to say it's riddled with inaccuracies so I'd 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 center 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 center because when all this mass starts clumping together what happens at the center 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 so 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 hydrogen and they sort of smash together to form a helium.

4:20And because of this E equals mc squared, and what you do is you have a tiny amount of mass is lost when this fusion process happens. But that mass is multiplied by the speed of light, which is 300 million metres 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 so And I understand it.

5:17So thank you. Actually, as a science communicator, that's the biggest thing. Oh, my God, am I losing you? No, not at all. I hope it makes sense. And I did single science UCSE. Can you imagine? So if you can get me to understand it, you're onto 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. Yes. What do you think space teaches us about failure? I know that's a huge question, but I wonder how space perceives, what is a failure in space?

5:55Oh, well, it's funny because in space and 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 devised 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 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 all feels you know like starch thick and then things like out there but at the same time because we launch something into 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 things one of my horrors is because i suffered in dyslexia i didn't realize 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 sort of we're pretty nasty to our equipment to make sure that it will work when it gets out there do you have a favorite star oh a favorite star yes i think i'd go for betelgeuse because it's in my favorite constellation orion and betelgeuse 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.

7:41Beetlejuice 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 look just 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 sort of light the color 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 what's it doing 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.

8:31Yes, mysteries. Yes. It keeps me in a job. As a scientist, I love going out and speaking to kids. Things I love to tell them is that people, I think, feel that we've come a long way with science. We've almost got it sussed and we haven't. There are just so many mysteries, so many things we don't understand. We only know what 6 % of the universe is made of. The other 94%, we have 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 perhaps they'll come up with solutions that we haven't found yet.

9:07OK, 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. Yes. 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 the stars dictated their future.

9:41I 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. Constellations are quite complicated because in the past, people used to talk about a celestial sphere. So the Earth was the centre 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 a constellation like Orion, some of the stars in Orion are quite close to us.

10:15Some 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. Some are far away, some are 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 day depth that you're 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.

10:47It'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. Yes, we are. And tides are influenced by the position of the planets. Well, maybe the moon and the sun. Okay, the moon and the sun. 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.

11:24No, 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 sort of 1.3 billion times the volume of Earth. If you go to the next door neighbour star, that's 40 trillion kilometres away from us. So 4.28 light years. And if I was travelling with modern technology, it would take me 76 ,000 years to get there. And so these are just sort of bodies in space. And so I think they have very, very little influence on us. It depends, because if you go into the metaphysical, people believe that that's the case. But if we're talking about scientifically, it would be hard to justify how that thing, trillions of kilometres away, is having an influence on us here on Earth.

12:05OK, 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 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 okay 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 But if we went to another star system, our sun could be part of a constellation.

12:47So, yes, it's just 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? 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.

13:26And 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.

14:01And 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 onto your first failure, because it's so beautiful.

14:32And 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 a little 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 you know 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 kit during the day when my daughter's gone to school.

15:07But I don't know, there's something peaceful and quiet. And I think it's 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 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 sort of you know 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 then say that 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 I've just been a lunatic I used to look out of the window and moonlight would come in and that beautiful you know warm and silver light would flood the room and all the scary things would go away and so the moon was my friend and it was sort of my companion in these sort of yeah the 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 hand and said, how naughty were you?

16:57I'd never thought of it. I laughed at that response. No, it wasn't like that. So the thing is, I didn't realise 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 some schools they would just close and 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 realized but I was doing a radio program 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.

17:50I 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.

18:22And 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.

19:06And 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 slow burn and continue and maybe less intense, but sort of lovely to have them there. And yes, I think that's beautiful. 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.

19:44so 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'd go to school school in the 1970s and kids pick on any differences and so 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 ever 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 didn't belong to Nigeria I just felt I didn't belong anywhere I was just like slipping between the cracks.

20:40Space and Star Trek. And the clangers you loved as well, didn't you? 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 pioneers. They deliberately had people from all over the world. Chekhov from Russia, Captain Kirk from America, 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 no that's so 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 yeah your bills of resilience and i think kids don't know any different when kids growing up they assume that everybody's going through the same thing i was realizing that other people had sort of a more long-term friendships and things like that i don't think i'm very good with stress i 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.

22:02I can't remember feeling stressed. I think I'm an optimist. 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. 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, no, I was the runt of the litter. 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.

22:31Yeah 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 onto 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. 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 colors 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 a slightly splayed out in the image and so 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's a telescope making classes or 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 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 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.

24:09Making 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 a lens. Newsom 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 me 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 of 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 we end up with a spherical surface so you have to work the center to make it into a parabola and then you coat it with some silver or aluminium so it's a shiny surface.

25:14You put it in a box with another little flat mirror and you've got a telescope. Now, this did take, well, actually, it took me a number of years, like, but it was a labour 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 centre 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, I need a bit more.

25:45Or I've got a bulge over here, so I need to work that bit. You feckle 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. I've done the rubbing and then tell me, yeah, test it. No, it's too soon. No, wait, wait, wait. Plus 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.

26:40You'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. 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.

27:13So when I was growing up, I think when I was five years old, my father was saying, what's your Oxbridge College when you go to? 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 and another time of stress.

27:47It'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 energies. 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 about 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 you know 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

28:31let'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 thing is I'm not the best influence on her, but I think 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.

29:17It'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 spending more time in it. 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 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.

29:47So things go from sort of, you know, 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 finding system and I'd sort of get it all set up. I'd say, yes, okay. But then slowly but surely, just dissolve 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 probably I didn't realize yes 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 so little notebooks I get to write lists and things like that I think Stanley Kubrick likes stationery so I was thinking 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?

30:57Yes 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 magpies it 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'm sort of 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 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 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 of course 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 sort of right hawks and things and things to get them excited and so yes it's leaping into that void and when you're in there it 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.

32:47Like you're allowed to play and not live by these rigid rules. And I suppose I'm obsessed 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.

33:22So I guess I became a carer. And I didn't really realise, but I'd go shopping and I'd collect the money from his... His disability benefits. Yeah, his 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'm 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.