When Katie Melua’s ‘Piece by Piece‘ album came out in 2005, I pretty much ignored it. Katie Melua has a sweet voice and her selection of songs in that first album was not that bad. However, she evidently did not have that something that could get – and sustain – my attention. I have to admit that I regret it now. I have a newfound respect for her and her music, and for reasons that, strangely enough, have almost nothing to do with her music.

The leading single of her second album ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ became her first top five single in the U.K., and got the attention of Simon Singh, a well known journalist and science writer, because of its opening verse that, according to Singh, “is deeply annoying, because she demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method.” (Katie Melua’s bad science, Simon Singh, The Guardian, 30/09/2005)

We are 12 billion light-years from the edge,
That’s a guess,
No one can ever say it’s true,
But I know that I will always be with you.

The problem, as Simon Singh writes, is that “the role of the scientist is slowly being undermined with a growing belief that scientific results are merely subjective guesses that go in and out of fashion.”

Katie Melua, much to her credit, said that she felt embarrassed by the error in the song, particularly given that she had been a member of her school’s astronomy club. She even agreed to rerecord the song replacing the above verse with the following, proposed by Simon Singh, that would do justice to cosmology, and the scientific method in general.

We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe,
That’s a good estimate with well-defined error bars,
And with the available information,
I predict that I will always be with you.

Michael Shermer (The Sceptics Society) presents this story in one of his lectures (you can listen to Katie Melua singing both versions of her song):