Throw three random darts at a board and score less than 40 and you might as well have played blindfold; in two decades technology will be sufficiently developed to identify alien life; swearing is beneficial in relieving pain; the UK wakes up 25 to 30 tonnes heavier each day; we are merely a society of cells being acted upon by evolution, with the prime function to reproduce… Such were the random jottings of this life-curious attendee at Big Science Saturday, at which a collection of experts and enthusiasts gathered to discuss subjects as various as the hidden mathematics in sport (what is the probability of Isner and Mahut repeating their marathon tennis match?), five ways the world might come to an end (there are 50 described in speaker Alok Jha’s book), how hormones affect our eating habits and much more.

This was a fascinating, very well-organised and top value-for-money event. No fewer than twelve different sessions were on offer, designed to provoke debate as well as inform.

Divided into small groups after the presentation of “Why Does Swearing Work?”, which featured clips of an experiment with Stephen Fry as a guinea pig, the discussion as to whether school children should be allowed to swear provoked intelligent debate: “Yes” if expletive was an understandable, spontaneous outburst for pain relief, and “No” if it meant lazily avoiding use of the rich vocabulary of the English language.

At a different forum, octogenarian Lewis Wolpert’s advocacy of euthanasia might not have met applause.