Science comes alive this week for about 2,500 school students at the Hong Kong Science Museum, with a series of lectures called Science Alive! The talks, which include a laser show and perhaps a few bangs and controlled explosions, are organised by the museum, the British Council and Education Department in Hong Kong and London's Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine. Sponsorship comes from the Croucher Foundation.
British Council assistant director for educational exchanges David Foster said the idea was to improve public understanding of science and 'to show people that the science can be more than getting their exams'.
The Education Department had been particularly keen on the teachers' workshops that aimed to show how experiments could be transferred easily to the classroom, he said. Science students in Britain generally do more practical work than in Hong Kong, where the emphasis is on learning rather than doing.
This year, in the eighth of the series, three lecturers - two from Imperial and one from the Royal Institution of Great Britain - will give talks and workshops on subjects ranging from how lasers work and how useful they are to the way atoms link together and the physics behind modern communications.
Mathematics may not strike students as the sort of subject that lends itself to use of tennis racquets and cans of food and drink, but these will be among the props to be used by Imperial senior maths lecturer Frank Berkshire - 'on the whim of the speaker', he says. How he will show 'the dynamics of fishing and floating' is a mystery to be revealed.
Some parents may be a little worried that their offspring will want to emulate the hobby of Ilya Eigenbrot, born in Leningrad and now laser science consultant at Imperial: he collects lasers, which seems rather more expensive and awkward than stamp-collecting. He will be showing how lasers are used in daily life, such as in the CD player, and that a supposedly complicated instrument is actually founded on basic physics. And Richard Catlow, Wolfson professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, will use the stick and ball models of atoms and computers to show how knowing about molecular links leads to new semiconductors and better drugs.
