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Soundings: Dentures and deep time

2005; BMJ; Volume: 331; Issue: 7529 Linguagem: Inglês

0959-8138

Kevin Barraclough,

Dental Education, Practice, Research

The only thing I really remember about “Harold” was that he would keep his dentures in different sets of jars in the laboratory marked “Best Pair,” “Reasonable Pair,” and “Not So Good.” Quite often he would do without them altogether, and then he looked like Harold Steptoe from the 1970s UK television sitcom about rag and bone men. Harold was not what you would call an inspirational teacher, but on this occasion he passed around a small black rock with shiny crystals on the surface. It was heavy and about twice the size of a golfball. The students passed it around perfunctorily with a conspicuous lack of interest and mild distaste in case it had come into contact with the dentures. It returned rapidly to Harold who pocketed it, and then droned on about x ray diffraction patterns for 45 minutes. Through the dusty windows of the Victorian lab we could see a summer afternoon beckoning and our lives drifting away. At the end we were all getting up to leave when someone asked him what the rock was. It was, he said, the oldest thing you will ever touch. It was a meteorite formed over four and half billion years ago—before the earth or the sun had formed. It was a third of the age of the universe, he said, older than most of the stars in the sky. We asked if we could look again, but he shook his head, rattling his second best pair of dentures. That was my first experience of “deep time.” My second experience was a couple of years ago. It was 2 am on a crystal clear, starlit night, and from the makeshift observatory at the bottom of our garden I saw the Einstein Cross. It was a tiny, fuzzy collection of five blobs of starlight looking a little like a Gaelic brooch. When I looked away from the eyepiece I was looking at a landscape of fields and trees lit only by starlight. When I looked back in the eyepiece I was looking at a universe that was a third its present age. Back then there were big fierce stars and little else. There was no rock, no heavy elements, and no life. Things like that change your perspective. Certainly, if I ever have dentures, I'm not going to have a “Not So Good” pair.