{"id":659,"date":"2008-07-16T21:19:57","date_gmt":"2008-07-16T21:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/07\/16\/in_which_i_encounter_the_scientists_of_tomorrow\/"},"modified":"2008-07-16T21:19:57","modified_gmt":"2008-07-16T21:19:57","slug":"in_which_i_encounter_the_scientists_of_tomorrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2008\/07\/16\/in_which_i_encounter_the_scientists_of_tomorrow\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I encounter the scientists of tomorrow"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I think back to what influenced me most to become a scientist, I have never been able to pinpoint a precise moment. Like many children, I captured moths and fireflies in jam jars, played around with chemistry sets, polished rocks, pressed flowers and ferns between pages, looked at pond water under my father’s microscope and at the moons of Jupiter through his telescope. I was addicted to a series of stories<\/a> about a teenaged boy who used science to solve problems, though I could relate more to his female side-kick, who always struck me as the more sensible of the two. I had a series of very good teachers, and I enjoyed all my science classes. <\/p>\n

\nBut until very recently, I had forgotten completely about the Science Fairs \u2013 until I was asked to judge one.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nNot easy being green<\/strong> An experiment to test the effect of chlorine on hair<\/p>\n

\nMy friend Alom Shaha is an amazing guy: not only is he a freelance science filmmaker<\/a>, but he’s also a part-time physics teacher at the Camden School for Girls. It transpires that the official UK science curriculum is so heartbreakingly easy that his students had finished it weeks earlier with both hands tied behind their backs and were filling in the remaining year with more adventurous, creative endeavors, including the school’s first ever Science Fair. When I met up with Alom and his pupils on the fateful afternoon, I found them out in the sunny grounds, learning about the physics of bubble blowing. In addition to the novelty of hearing Alom called variously called ‘Sir’ and ‘Mr Shaha’ by a chorus of winningly enthusiastic girls, I bore witness to a few bubbles that definitely seemed to violate the laws of physics, and got to enjoy a genuine English school dinner. (Disappointingly, there wasn’t a Turkey Twizzler in sight \u2013 after all the Jamie Oliver-inspired media hype, I’d been dead keen to try them on the grounds that any snack food condemned by the Daily Mail<\/em> must surely be delicious.)<\/p>\n

\n“We don’t really know how to do<\/em> Science Fairs,” Alom confessed as he ushered me into the room. “It’s a Yank thing, isn’t it?”<\/p>\n

\nHe needn’t have worried: I was totally impressed. The projects touched on topics ranging from the aerodynamics of flight, the pharmacology of caffeine and the putative danger of lead in our lipsticks to whether chocolate is addictive (yes) and which soft drink is the worst for your teeth (Ribena, since you ask). Never mind that the methodology was a bit rough: for example, the kids responsible for the latter project thought it was perfectly fine to substitute eggshells for tooth enamel because they “read on the internet that they were similar”. And a group studying whether branding affected consumer choice hadn’t considered that it might be misleading to compare Pepsi to Coke disguised with a Pepsi label, because Coke and Pepsi might not taste the same, and two variables were being changed instead of one. But the look of intense concentration on their faces when I explained this, and their dawning comprehension, was a revelation: this<\/em> is why people teach.<\/p>\n

\nAnd no science fair would be complete without at least one baking soda and vinegar volcano, which erupted three times during the course of the hour to cheers and applause. A few no-shows were especially disappointing: for example, the question of whether a melon can grow from a seed in your stomach will probably remain forever unanswered. <\/p>\n

\n\"\"<\/p>\n

\nFrothy<\/strong> Mind the Gap heartily applauds this old science fair staple <\/p>\n

\nBut what I and the other three judges found most interesting was the fact the projects split clearly into two camps: those that were merely descriptive and literature-research based (“What is acid rain?”) and those that actually tested a hypothesis (“Do different kinds of music affect heart-rate differently?”). We judges especially favored those that sought to answer a question, but even as I felt strongly that this should be the case, I couldn’t help remembering my own long ago blue-ribbon effort: a diorama of the solar system made out of paper m\u00e2ch\u00e9. It was only much later that I must have learned that science wasn’t actually about demonstrating what was already known to be there<\/em>, but was about adding some new knowledge to the world. <\/p>\n

\nSome of these kids, clearly, were well on their way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I think back to what influenced me most to become a scientist, I have never been able to pinpoint a precise moment. Like many children, I captured moths and fireflies in jam jars, played around with chemistry sets, polished … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}