‘How many people have you slept with in your life, roughly?’ she asked. We were lying in bed in the morning. ‘You go first,’ I said, needing time to think of the right answer. She looked at the ceiling and thought long and hard. ‘About 50,’ she said finally. I asked her about the worst experience. ‘Your turn, Low life,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to hear this.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it would take a Professor Brian Cox working with the latest European Space Agency number-crunching software to come up with anything like an approximate figure.’
By a weird coincidence, the next evening I was invited by a friend of a friend to have dinner with Professor Cox at his home. I had neither met him before nor seen him on telly.
Over dinner we talked about Einstein’s theory of relativity being the last word, still, on how we understand the universe.
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