Saturday 13th March 2010
It was an inordinately arduous five-hour journey in the Oxford Physics transit van (hereinafter referred to as the physics van!!!) to the Big Bang Fair in Manchester. On the team: me, Suzie, Rosalind and Svet. Our task was simple: explain particle accelerators in twenty minutes, eight times in three days, and in the process hopefully convince a few kids that ‘scientist’ and ‘football star’ are comparably glamorous careers. Outreach-tastic.
We were sharing our stage—which was actually configured as a catwalk—with a handful of other outreach shows. It was somewhat lax on the part of the organisers that none of their materials, from the organisational e-mails in the run-up to the event, through the brochures handed out, to the poster displayed near our stage or even on the official website, explained at all what each show was actually about. This was presumably mystifying to punters—our own show, Accelerate!, is not exactly blessed with the most descriptive of titles—but it also left me curious as to who exactly our co-conspirators were.
Svet and Suzie levitate a superconductor
I’m no Mystic Meg, but most of these didn’t come as any particular surprise: For example, ‘The magic of maths’ used maths to explain card tricks, and ‘Introduction to nanotechnology’ saw a (slightly crazy) chemist brew up a magnetic fluid live on stage by way of introducing nanotechnology. All well within the bounds of expectation. But what the Hell could I expect from ‘ActionDog’?
It certainly sounds cringingly twattish and overly outreachy. This, sadly, was just the thing for our zone, which was well down-with-the-kids, wankily christened ‘The NeXt Factor’. Eww. My predictions for ActionDog’s show fell into two rough categories—it was either some kind of Aibo-Fido robo-dog whose jerky gait (why do robots always walk with the perambulatory equivalent of a stammer?), whining, buzzing motors and red blinking eyes like a 70s Doctor Who baddie hiding in a Christmas tree amused bystanders whilst some idiot in a white coat with ‘crazy’ hair explained how he worked; or some prick covered in fake fuzz bounding around like a maniac averting scientific peril, barking ‘ActionDog to the rescue!’ when the only thing which really needs saving would be the credibility of the berk in the dog suit, and, soon, the wider practice of science communication.
Imagine my total fucking astonishment, then, when ActionDog turned out to be a fashion show. With actual, genuine (= occasionally quite hot) models. It certainly seemed to explain why our stage was fashioned as it was. The science connection here, in case you were wondering, is that their garments were inspired by the process of human ageing. And ActionDog was not really the title of the show, but the name of the company who had overseen it.
Svet explodes two of our patent hydrogen balloons
Our show usually immediately followed theirs, so we shared a backstage area with the ActionDog team. As these implausibly tall, impossibly skinny, professionally beautiful girls in platform shoes were stripping to their underwear (and extremely tiny their knickers were too) and being zipped rapidly into their next outfit, I was pouring liquid nitrogen, hissing and steaming, into a bucket (a process which, in case you were wondering, strikes fear into the average model) and hoping like Hell that static from their woolly leg-warmers didn’t cause a spark, setting one of our balloons full of hydrogen alight and resulting in an explosion of rubber, shards of science demonstration, and shapely body parts.
This is not a social situation that my life so far had prepared me for. In spite of my secondary school headmaster’s dream that we would emerge from his establishment as well-rounded individuals, never once had he given an assembly on talking to half-naked women whilst holding a tub of liquid air. I decided to stick to what I knew, and showed them how to levitate a superconductor above some magnets. I can only imagine that they were impressed.
Besides semi-clad hotties, the Big Bang Fair provided plenty to see and do. One stand allowed kids to make their own custom Perspex sunglasses with a laser cutter, another allowed fascinated punters to fondle a human placenta in a bag, and yet a third allowed one to design a jet engine and then see how efficient it was—for some reason on a giant 3D screen. Though it was at times gratuitously sciencey, there was an all-pervading air of slickitude which just about made up for it.
Talking of slickitude, our own show went quite well and, of the 17,000 visitors to the fair, we reckon we snagged about 500 to watch us blowing stuff up, levitating other stuff and detecting particles from outer space. I even managed to get myself filmed by Planet SciCast exploding one of our hydrogen balloons on a thermal camera—if you freeze-frame it, you can see that the fireball makes it to 150°C, but I have a feeling that’s an underestimate.
The only minor incident was when we nearly set a child on fire. One of our hydrogen balloons was presumably a little under-full, and the candle on a stick must have melted the latex without initially igniting the hydrogen. The balloon zipped off on a spasmodic trajectory, with a sound somewhere between typical released-balloon rasping and the roar of a rocket motor as a jet of flame propelled it around our heads like a huge, angry wasp with afterburners, before coming to rest, still flaming, at the terrified child’s feet. Thankfully for our health and safety record, she was not wearing highly flammable woolly leg-warmers. And it demonstrated to our audience two of the most important things about science: 1. you never know what’s going to happen, and 2. it is fucking brilliant.
« Wednesday 23rd December 2009
Bob says (22:57 30/03/2010) ¶
So now I know! I was wondering who those cool tall skinny glam/punk 70s style over-makeup-ed gals were wandering around. They rather stood out from the general ambient geekiness going on.