People often ask me what is so great about being a scientist, and here it is in a nutshell.
Today a good friend of mine defended her dissertation (Yay Dr. Ninja!). We had champagne afterward in the director’s office. One of his jobs is to collect meteorites and have them categorized. So he passed around a meteorite.
A meteorite that might be from Mars.
Seriously, I just held a chunk of rock that’s probably worth a million dollars (it was about the size of my fist). No matter what it turns out to be (though Mars is pretty damned likely given the other evidence, we’ll have to wait for the smoking gun later), this rock fell from the sky and is a piece of another planet.
Yeah, I held a rock from another planet today. That’s why being a scientist is so cool.
