WHY DO we study the stars? It’s not just to get a job; Britain has more Premier League football players than professional astronomers. As children, we’re taught that science solves problems. It’s “the scientific method”: you see a problem, make a hypothesis, devise an experiment to test that hypothesis. But what problems? And in fact, I’ve never seen science done that way.

Three years ago, a student at Boston College, Chris Noyes, approached Fr Cy Opeil in the physics department for a research project: he wanted something to add to his résumé when he applied to medical school. Cy and I, fellow Jesuits, had previously used Cy’s elaborate equipment (obtained to do basic research in the solid state physics of crystals) to measure the thermal properties of meteorites, so Cy handed Noyes some iron meteorites and showed him how to make the measurements. Noyes turned in his results and went off to medical school. Cy passed the student’s work on to me and my meteorite collaborators, where it sat on our computers for a couple of years while we worked on other topics.