Along with the picnics, the festivals, the intermittent rain and the parks, it’s time for another London summer event: the Summer Science Exhibition. Fish! Mars! Blackboards! Spinning toys! Music! It’s a chance to see exhibitions from researchers located all over the UK, in one place, and only a minute’s walk away from St James’s Park (which is looking gorgeous at the moment).
(Picture by jurvetson.)
The best way to find out what’s going on is probably just to turn up and wander around; if you like the Science Museum, chances are there’ll be something for you here as well. But it never hurts to know what to expect, so here’s a few highlights:
- Piranhas: Are they as fierce as pop culture says they are? And do they group together in schools for hunting, or for self-preservation?
- Spinning toys: Researchers are demonstrating principles of physics with spinning toys, including “spinning eggs that rise against gravity” (though only onto one end, not into the air, alas).
- Pigments: Is it possible to design a colour that’s really really difficult to counterfeit? And what uses could there be (other than 1980s fashion fads) for pigments that change colour with temperature?
- Underwater exploration using robots: What effect does deep-sea drilling have on the surrounding wildlife? And how can you even tell, when the water pressure and environment is so inhospitable and difficult to investigate? The answer to this, as to so many other questions, is: underwater robots.
- Protecting the planets: With spacecraft popping around the different planets of the solar system, poking at them one after another, how do you stop micro-organisms from one planet being carried along to the next?
There’s also a response to Einstein’s famous blackboard, preserved after a lecture at Oxford in 1931. The blackboard itself is too delicate to be shown as part of the exibition, but artists, scientists and celebrities were asked to create their own blackboards, and six of these will be on show. And repeated throughout the week, there’s an interactive talk on the deep sea, with a researcher showing off his discoveries from a recent trip to the Arctic.
Summer Science Exhibition 2007: The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AG. Monday 2 July: 6.00pm to 9.00pm. Tuesday 3 July: 10.00am to 9.00pm. Wednesday 4 July and Thursday 5 July: 10.00am to 4.30pm.
