When I was in college, long before most readers of this blog were born, I was a double major in physics and mathematics. There was a fairly predictable path of eight physics courses over four years for the physics major, and a fairly predictable path of eight math courses over four years for the math major. Not much room for other things. In my case I came within a couple of credits of also earning a triple major in philosophy. But I did not quite get there.
Conspicuously absent from my four-year course of study was geology. At the college that I attended there was a geology course that was part of the physics department. There was never room in my packed course schedule for that geology course. That course had a counterpart at many colleges and universities, I later learned, and at many schools it was somewhat condescendingly nicknamed “rocks for jocks”, the course that a student might sign up for as a way of satisfying a requirement for getting a certain minimum number of science credits if the student otherwise was not going to find it very easy to satisfy that requirement.
Decades have passed and over and over again I have been reminded how much I missed by never having taken that geology course, or any other geology course. Pretty much all I knew was that there are three kinds of rocks: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous. That was it. Which brings me around to the word “regolith”. What does “regolith” mean?
A chief reason why I think about words like this is that I keep hoping that life will eventually return to normal and there will be things like cocktail parties and salon dinners where people can talk about stuff and learn new things from each other. Yes by now I have despaired that this return to normalcy would happen in 2020, but maybe in 2021? 2022? Anyway, what does “regolith” mean?
