Professor Edward Anders died at the age of 98 – a meteorite as a metaphorical ‘poor man’s space probe’

Edward Anders, the cosmochemist who invented the famous metaphor of a meteorite as ‘a poor man’s space probe’ in 1960, died on 1 June 2025 in San Mateo, California. Rest in Peace, Edward Anders!

Edward Anders, Who Duped Nazis and Illuminated the Cosmos, Dies at 98 (New York Times, 19 June 2025)

In July 2011 Professor Edward Anders wrote the following e-mail to me about how his metaphor came into being:

“You are quite right, this metaphor dates back to 1960, and I was the
guilty party.

I gave a paper Meteorites and Asteroids at a AAAS meeting in Chicago
in the fall of 1959. To my great surprise, a few months later the
AAAS gave me the Best Paper award (now Newcomb Cleveland Prize) and
invited me-sandwiched between famous speakers-to give a plenary
lecture at their big meeting in NYC in early 1960. That was an
opportunity to introduce a large audience from many disciplines to
modern work on meteorites. Naturally I tried to season my talk with a
bit of humor and some quotable phrases. Even at that early time some
forms of the phrase “Poor man’s (this or that)” was occasionally seen
in print, so barely more that 2 years after Sputnik, “poor man’s
space probe” would be instantly understood by most people.

I included it in an abstract or summary for the AAAS, which quoted it
in a press release. Newspapers had a hay day with my talk, and apart
from a bunch of crank letters, I also got inquiries from a couple of
literary agents who had overestimated my literary talents from the
press reports. I dealt with the former in my usual way, matching up
pairs of cranks and encouraging them to correspond with each other.
For the latter and for book publishers, my stock response was that I
would have no time to write books until my scientific menopause.”