LAST December, less than 24 hours before one of the country’s most eminent food scientists was to deliver the Royal Institution’s (RI) Christmas lectures, Andrew Marmery was told he needed to build a diarrhoea simulator.
“The executive director decided that the lecture needed it,” says Marmery, 27, the RI’s science demonstration technician. He took a fish tank, drilled a hole in the bottom and inserted a pipe in the hole so that the water wouldn’t run out. “Then we asked a kid to poke a stick with a nail on the end into the tank and lacerate the tube, at which point floods of water coloured with Oxo cubes came flooding out the bottom of the tank — it went down well,” he says.
Like the team who put together exhibits for Q before they are shown to James Bond, Marmery attempts to make the often complex observations of each year’s Christmas lecturer digestible to children by means of visual display.
The 2006 series, to be delivered by Marcus du Sautoy, a professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, has led to Marmery assembling a giant rack of exploding balloons “to illustrate the sieve of Eratosthenes, one of the early theories of prime numbers”; a 6ft magnetic pendulum — “that’s all about the chaos and unpredictability of the real world”; and a giant abacus displaying the cover art for Coldplay’s best-selling album X&Y.
“That explains the Baudot code — like Morse code, but with ones and zeros rather than dots and dashes.
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“The lectures are an opportunity for children to see science presented in a fun way,” says Marmery, who graduated in physics at Bristol University and got a job at the RI after a brief stint at Lloyd’s TSB. He is seated inside a cavernous laboratory in the RI building in Mayfair, surrounded by the paraphernalia of lectures past: among them a giant model of Saturn, numerous skeletons, and a miniature air hockey table. “To show how invertebrates in Antarctic waters avoid their blood freezing up — it’s a long story,” he sighs.
“In some ways, it’s about pulling the wool over (children’s) eyes, pretending you’re not talking about science when in fact you are,” he says of a tradition that dates back to Michael Faraday’s first demonstrations in the 1820s.
Sometimes the ideas don’t work. He gestures to a lump of clear plastic the size of a television. “That was a representation of a four-dimensional hyper-cube for the series on space. Ultimately we figured that it wasn’t really suitable for 11-year-olds.”
What role does he see for the lectures in an age of falling applications for science courses and the closure of university departments? “There are many more avenues open to kids now. Part of the blame rests with the media, which has a lightweight approach to covering science. But it is important to understand how the world around you works — physics can be very enjoyable.”
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