The New York Times had a story in the Science Times today that made me flinch at first. A scientist from the Jet Propulsion Lab decided to test NASA’s clean rooms—labs where the air is filtered and employees wear sterile “bunny suits” and masks to prevent contamination of equipment and vehicles intended for space travel– to see whether these environments might harbor life forms of their own. NASA found a surprise: lots of very hardy bacteria–including species previously unknown to science–find a way to survive in the clean rooms.

The reason I flinched is that we did a live Webcast from Goddard Space Flight Center a few years ago as part of our Origins project. I spent a lot of time in the NASA center’s giant clean room, alongside new cameras and a full-scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope, filming and interviewing engineers and technicians as they prepared equipment for a space shuttle servicing mission of the telescope. Did I get exposed to some super-hardy dangerous microbe? Such is the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

Well, NASA is a lot more concerned about contaminating planets and other space environments with its space vehicles than with sickening the earth-bound humans visiting clean rooms but it seems there wasn’t much for me to worry about anyway. The so-called extreme organisms survive on trace nutrients in the air and unlikely surfaces such as paint. By just playing with an Exploratorium exhibit this morning, I was exposed to many more bacterial species that thrive on human skin and in our bodies. Come to think of it, I’ll go wash my hands now, just to be on the safe side.

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting with Rocky Kolb while he was in Berkeley recently giving a talk. Rocky formerly led the particle astrophysics group at Fermilab and is now chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He’s also a great public speaker and a bit of a celebrity: Rocky was Dr. December in the Stud Muffins of Science Calendar, circa 1996. One of the things we talked about over eggs and pancakes was the dual personality of physics. More than any other scientific discipline, physics depends on two varieties of scientist: the theorist and the experimentalist. Rocky is a theorist, but probably the most famous theoretical physicist was Einstein. His relativity theories, written early in the last century, kept the experimentalists who build observatories and particle accelerators busy for decades trying to confirm his theoretical predictions. But experimentalists like nothing better than coming up with observations about the universe, matter, or the inner workings of particles that catch theorists with their mathematical pants down. A sign about the doorway of condensed matter physicist Sid Nagel reads: Here is where theories come to die. Rocky’s take: “We’re smarter, better looking and generally taller.” But the shorter ones do occasionally exact their revenge. It happened in 1999 when Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab announced that, billions of years after the big bang, the universe was actually accelerating rather than slowing down and collapsing under the weight of gravity. No theorist had predicted this finding and collectively they’ve been scratching their heads ever since trying to explain it. “This is the first time in 3000 years of cosmology that theorists are playing catch-up to the experimentalists. In the past there were more theories than observations could confirm or refute, but now there are more observations that the theories can not explain, ” Rocky told me. It’s certainly an interesting time to be a cosmologist and a sideline observer.