"No nerds allowed" declared the poster announcing FameLab at the
Cheltenham Science Festival on Saturday. The six finalists in this
talent competition for budding communicators gave their presentations
before a panel of five judges, while the audience joined in by voting
on electronic handsets. Hosting the event was the inimitable Quentin
Cooper, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Material World. He
described FameLab as a kind of Pop Idol for the science media.
Actually, one or two of the finalists did display a trace of nerdiness,
but the winner - Mark Lewney - was as un-nerdy as you get. Strumming
his guitar to illustrate his brief exposition of the physical basis of
music, he won over a diverse audience including many young people. If
science is to reach out to new audiences, Lewney is just the kind of
presenter it needs.
Veteran science communicator and fertility expert Lord
Winston looked uncomfortable. "When are you going to grow up?" he asked
Lewney. But Lewney was unfazed. "Never," he replied. A gust of fresh
air is finally blowing through the musty halls of science.
That same spirit of iconoclasm and fun animated the
whole festival, now in its fourth year. Cheltenham directors Frank
Burnet and Kathy Sykes, together with this year's guest director, film
producer Lord Puttnam, put together a sparkling five-day programme of
talks, interactive exhibits and other events aimed at people of all
ages. Lord Puttnam led three fascinating debates - two about science
and film, and one about the coverage of science in the news media.
Highlights included Lisa Randall, glamorous professor of physics at
Harvard University, presenting her ideas about hidden extra dimensions
of space, and novelist Philip Pullman discussing the science of belief
with Lord Winston.
In another event exploring "new frontiers of taste",
chef Heston Blumenthal served a selection of carefully prepared foods
to 300 guests to accompany an investigation of umami, the flavour
produced by glutamate. Cooks had long known about sweet, sour, salty
and bitter flavours, but umami wasn't identified by scientists until
the 20th century. This confluence of chemistry and cooking, dubbed
"molecular gastronomy", proved that science need not be indigestible.
Meanwhile, engineer and artist Sarah Angliss was turning
people into cyborgs. By fitting volunteers with simple devices hacked
together from mobile phone vibrators, burglar alarm spares and metal
detectors, the idea was to endow them with new sensory powers such as
the ability to sense magnetism or to see behind them. These weird
animal-machine hybrids lent an eerie feeling to the festival as they
blundered around with their headsets and buzzers. After several days,
they assembled in front of a curious audience to talk about how the
devices influenced their feelings and behaviour.
Popular science has often been accused of dumbing down.
But the Cheltenham Science Festival somehow pulls off the trick of
making it accessible and fun without shying away from the complexities
of real research. It achieves this, in part, by providing a range of
events for people of different ages, from the interactive children's
exhibits in the "Discovery Zone" to the sophisticated talks for
intelligent adults. Sadly, the key teenage audience is less clearly
catered for. But FameLab should go some way towards redressing that.
Dylan Evans is senior lecturer in intelligent autonomous
systems at the University of the West of England.
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