Science for slightly inebriated Adults
Last night I had the privilege of being at the London Science Museum “lates” evening for March, which if you don’t know, is where the Science Museum is transformed into a play ground for adults for the evening. There is live music, from both DJ’s on different levels of the museum, and small bands in other corners, displays of interesting science (create your own cloud seemed to draw big crowds), and the chance to experiment play in the Launch Pad area with no kids in sight! Not to mention the multiple bars throughout the building for the adults to indulge in some light drinking!
The Science Museum helpers put on fantastic shows (I’m guessing that the shows are exactly the same as they are normally for the younger members of the audience – however I’ll report back Monday night on that!). We managed to see the whole of the seminar show on bubbles and how they are created. The audience participation was fantastic, and it was genuinely lovely to see so many adults being interested and enthralled by such everyday science.
Watching the adults trying to work out the experiments in the Launch Pad was fantastic, people trying to build an archway out of foam blocks without making them collapse, and the fantastic installation ‘Social Light’ by Scott Snibbe was deserving a place in the Tate Modern (more so than some of the installations which I saw there the other day). Using some kind of feedback system to detect the shadows created by a person in front of the projector to then work out on the fly the reflection that would occur on a plane to that person with a very thick beam of multicoloured light, so that the different colours (which effectively had different wavelengths) would scatter from the projected shadow – and then recording the shadow movements and image that was projected onto a website, and the artists collection (I presume that Scott will be using these again at some point in a different work of art). Reminiscent of the ubiquitous Apple iPod advert, the fun given to and images created by the adults big kids was fantastic.
The image produced by Social Light at the Science Museum
Overall this was one of the best nights that can be had in London for free, if you are even remotely interested in science, and having a good time, then make sure you head there for the next Late’s at the Science Museum.
In other news, we are very close to publishing our first manuscript to an international journal, I have to do a final proof read of the article before we submit, and the second one is very close to fruition too.
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