Seriously, Betty, you know what this meteor could mean to science. It could mean a lot. It could mean actual advances in the field of science.

Let me produce exhibit A: The man who once pressed 'rumba' on the Casio keyboard for a 90's pop band is now in charge of the Hadron Collider. He could kill us all with an unfortunately timed chord flashback.

And watching that keyboardist from D:REAM telling me that we are all made of universal sticky space plankton made me realise just how much science has been pimped and served up to the common man. That it is not necessarily a good thing.

To be fair, the feeling truly reverberated before this, when on a school trip to see the stage show of Johnny Ball where half-way through he was heckled.

There he was on the stage with his black marker pen and flip-chart. He energetically ran across the stage asking people for numbers and he would manipulate the numbers in a way that was as close to voodoo as I have witnessed.

The heckle - when it came - was as short as it was explosive.

Johnny Ball yelled to the audience: "Where did the remainder go? It went... [and he blew an increasingly high pitched whistle]"
The Heckler saw his chance with the precision of an electron microscope and at the end of the whistle and shouted in the silent auditorium: "Up your arse!"

Really - who on earth heckles Johnny Ball? But it was then when I thought - bringing science to the masses sometimes means that the masses can't run away fast enough. In every likelihood, this is why Johnny Ball wants us to increase our carbon emissions these days: so we'll die due to lack of oxygen and the Earth will go on fire - taking that asphixiated heckler with it as it sinks in a fiery ball below the stars. Hats off, Mr. Ball, that is some stone-cold putdown.

Trying to connect with the ordinary is particularly prevalent in advanced mathematics and physics.

A friend told me that his physics lecturer, attempting to help students understand an equation said:

This looks complex, but really think of X as a cow, Y as the field it is in and Z as the farm to which the field belongs. Now simply imagine that this cow is a perfect sphere, the field is a sterile vacuum and the farm is of infinite proportions that could not possibly exist.

For me science can be complex. I'll let it. I don't need an analogy.

And you know what? I am perfectly fine with that. I am very comfortable with areas of science to be obtuse, difficult and - for some - rewarding.

Now it seems to me that the whole of science is trying to be populist. It is trying to be Time Team doing History. I am not sure it is going to succeed.