Readers recommend: songs about discovery | Peter Kimpton

Is there life on Mars? What's in the woodshed? Is there a secret lover? What's in your pocket? Universal to personal, discover and uncover music that captures a eureka moment

If you've found out something remarkable, then perhaps the greatest way to celebrate it is to run naked down the street, proclaiming it to the neighbours. What the neighbours might proclaim back is anyone's guess. But Archimedes probably couldn't have cared less. He was said to have joyfully leaped out of his bath after discovering his own principle, or law of hydrostatics, that the buoyant force exerted a body immersed in water is equal to the weight of the water it displaces. So as well as having a very wet floor, who knows later how he celebrated, and what the neighbours thought, when he invented the Archimedes screw?

This week's highly proclamatory theme is ideal for song, because when we discovery something, it's only natural to sing out about it. And what more exciting discovery would there be than that of alien life? While the world is a flutter (and did so in their millions on the Guardian site this week) with the confirmation images of water being on Mars, not thousands of years ago, but now, alien microbes must surely exist in those gloopy, salty streaks somewhere. Unless of course we have accidentally contaminated and deposited them with a rover. Oh what an irony that would be. It's a bit like looking for your reading glasses for ages, only to discover they are on your head all the time.