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January 2026 – Didcot Cafe Scientifique, Tim Coulson, A Little History of Everything from the Big Bang to You
January 20 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Didcot Cafe Scientifique – talk on A little History of Everything from the Big Bang to You
Tuesday 20th January 2026
Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot
Have you ever wondered why you exist? After a brush with death in my early 20s I decided my life’s ambition would to try to find out whether science could answer this question. I started reading widely, while developing my career as a biologist, eventually ending up at Oxford. Thirty-five years after decided I wanted to try to answer this rather overly ambitious question, I had an enough knowledge to write a popular science book on the topic, which was published by Penguin. In this talk, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned after researching physics, chemistry, earth science, biology and psychology. Science does not have all the answers, but it has revealed a lot. If you want to know what science can tell you about your existence, and whether you were inevitable at the birth of the universe or have instead just won the cosmic lottery, come along.
Tim Coulson has been a science junky from a young age. He was brought up by drug-dealing parents – they ran a chain of pharmacy stores – in a small village outside Cambridge, eventually scraping through his O and A-levels. After a formative year spent teaching (and growing up a little) in Africa, he studied Biology at York, before doing his PhD at Imperial College. After jobs at the Zoological Society of London, the University of Cambridge, back at Imperial, and Stanford, he finally settled at Oxford where he is Professor of Zoology. His research focuses on the ecological and evolutionary roles that predators have on ecosystems, but he also writes popular science books and co-hosts the Science of the Times podcast produced by Streaming Spires podcasts.