Lecture by Prof. Martin McCoustra of Heriot-Watt University on how chemistry in space created the organic building blocks of life.
Prof. Martin McCoustra is speaking at the AK Bell Library on Friday 12 March, as part of the Curious Minds lecture series. He'll be talking about how the building blocks of life were formed in space, and the whole thing runs for about 90 minutes, starting at 19:30.
If you've ever wondered where the ingredients for life on Earth actually came from, this is exactly that. The old 'primordial soup' theory has a hard time because early Earth's geology lacked amino acids and other organic chemicals, yet meteorites are full of them. McCoustra, who's at Heriot-Watt University, researches how gas-phase chemistry and chemistry on dust and ice in space built those organic blocks, and how that likely drove the evolution of life on Earth and across the Universe. It's a big question, and he'll be working through it from the chemistry up.
Curious Minds is a series run by Culture Perth & Kinross and the Perthshire Society of Natural Science, one of Scotland's oldest scientific societies, which keeps an interest in the natural world going through lectures, meetings and field outings. The series is themed around 'Contemporary Science in Scotland' and has covered dinosaur fossils in Skye, the human genome, black holes, gravitational waves and the science of consciousness. This talk is part of the Bookmark festival, so it's one of several things on in the city around the same time.
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Tickets are £4.50 for PSNS members and £8.00 for non-members. The library is on York Place, PH2 8EP, and the talk starts at 19:30 on Friday 12 March.
