Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an astronomer. From his base at Cambridge University he spends his time trying to

understand cosmic evolution, in other words how the Earth and solar system were formed.

But the seeker after such big truths is no dreary academic with his head in the stars,

balanced, cultured and passionate about the need to widen interest in scientific subjects.

It's his contention that the general ideas of cosmology can be

expressed simply and clearly. The concepts involved are relatively straightforward, he says.

It's more difficult to understand a frog than the Cosmos. He is a Royal Society

Professor and the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Reese. First thing's first, Sir Martin,

what does the Astronomer Royal do? I have this image of you

tutoring the young princes about the sky at night. Well Astronomer Royal is a

rather antique title. It dates back to the 17th century. It used to be the person who ran the Greenwich Observatory, but for the last 25 years it's just been an honorary title given to a senior astronomer and my day job as it were is as a professor at Cambridge University and I hold

this title which is a purely onary one.

But if you did, it's a wonderful title, isn't it?

It sounds very grand.

If you did go to Buckingham Palace, you might begin by telling them that the

Cosmos is simpler to understand that the frog.

How can that be this unknown blackness that inspires such awe and fear in us all.

Well, it inspires tremendous awe and it's immense in scale, but it is amazing that we have been able

to understand quite a lot about our cosmic origins to see not only how the Earth evolved, but how our

solar system evolved and to trace cosmic history right back to what we call the Big Bang where

...