2011 Science Festival Dates: 7 – 12 June

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Festival Themes

Explore wonderful things, take your mind to new places or simply have a great night out at Cheltenham Science Festival.

The Festival features a huge variety of ideas and styles. To help guide you through the programme we’ve selected some of the key themes that run throughout. Our guest contributors have also written some fascinating introductions to selected events

Beautiful

Wed 8 Jun / 7:30pm / Parabola Arts Centre

Quentin Cooper gets a tingle of excitement over this beautiful performance.

It would never have crossed my mind, but dance is a fantastic way to get you thinking differently about something we seldom think about at all — the odd double-edged edginess of a shiver: that fleeting frisson of thrill or chill. Or both at once. What’s going on within us — why and how one set of pathways are used for such apparently conflicting emotions — is complex; but even though The Shiver was made with the involvement of Oxford neuroscientist Professor Morten Kringlebach, this isn’t a lecture in how we’re wired. It’s a performance combining gorgeous choreography, hypnotic music and the provocative, evocative poetry of Lemn Sissay. It is a thing of beauty. Something felt as much as understood, but which opens up all sorts of possibilities and questions that are then explored in the discussion at the end.

That’s the bit I chair — and I get a shiver every time I do it.

Quentin Cooper is a journalist and radio 4 presenter and a member of the Festival advisory group.

Other beautiful events

Brain Scan Live
BBC Wonders of the Universe
Exploring the Plasma Universe

 

Entertaining

Fri 10 Jun / 8:30pm / Town Hall Unreserved

Timandra Harkness recalls the premiere of her comedy show at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

I’m not sure that our show was the most intelligent on the Edinburgh Fringe, but our heckles certainly were. ‘Which year are you taking your data from?’ they shouted from the front row. ‘Is that stochastic modelling?’ and ‘Couldn’t that be accounted for by ... ?’ — which we paraphrased as 'show us yer control group!’

We expected a show about death to be scary and full of black humour. But when we did the research we felt more cheerful. Drinking a bit and being slightly overweight turn out to be better for you than being an underweight teetotaller. UK life expectancy is rising so fast that in the hour you spend watching the show, it’s gone up by 12 minutes. So in effect you’ve only wasted 48 minutes of your life laughing about death. And Maths.

You’re not getting a pro rata refund, though.

Timandra Harkness is a writer and performer and a member of the Festival advisory group.

Other entertaining events

A Question of Science
The School for Gifted Children
Slam the Atom

 

Inspiring

Sun 12 Jun / 6:45pm / Town Hall Unreserved

Mark Maslin shares his admiration for one of his greatest heroes.

Fridtjof Nansen was a colossus of science and polar exploration. He was one of the founders of neurology and a pioneer in the diverse fields of oceanography and skiing. In 1888 Nansen led the first ever scientific crossing of Greenland’s interior, having burnt their boats to discourage retreat. It took two months enduring climbing 9,000 feet above sea level, mastering dangerous ice, exhaustion, and temperatures of -45°C. Five years later Nansen wanted to prove his theory that a current carried the arctic sea ice from east to west. So he entombed his ship the Fram into the ice pack off Siberia, from which it emerged thirty-five months later into open water near Spitzbergen. Nansen was not aboard as he and a companion had decided to make the 400-mile dash to the North Pole. Though they did not quite make it, they came closer than anyone before and their adventures on the return trip have become the stuff of legends. Nansen was also an artist, historian, diplomat and a Kingmaker. Finally working for the League of Nations, the forerunner of the United Nations, as High Commissioner for Refugees he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Nansen proves the dictum that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’.

Mark Maslin is Head of the Department of Georgraphy at UCL and Co-Director of the Environment Institute there. He is also a member of the Festival advisory group.

Other inspiring events

Gagarin
What makes a Champion?
The Future of Technology

 

Compelling

Fri 10 Jun / 2:30pm / Town Hall Unreserved

Roger Highfield reflects on the compelling idea that some people in vegetative bodies have conscious minds.

While working at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, Adrian Owen made headlines worldwide for showing how the brains of apparently unaware patients in a vegetative state could respond in much the same way as conscious people when asked to think of a given activity, such as walking around or playing tennis. Remarkably, he and his colleagues trained a brain-damaged 29-year-old to answer questions by thinking of the corresponding activity, where wandering around the house was a “no” and serve-and-volleying a “yes”. Their conclusion, which is as heartening as it is disturbing, was that some vegetative bodies harbour conscious minds.

More extraordinary still, Adrian can now use brain scanning to probe the bewildering penumbra of possibilities that lie between oblivion and consciousness. In natural sleep, we are surprisingly aware of what is going on around us. This is not the case when the sleep is drug-induced, as our experience during major surgery demonstrates – but even here, Adrian and his colleagues at Cambridge’s Division of Anaesthesia showed that the brain remains highly active when heavily sedated, and even responds to people’s speech with a crackle of activity.

Roger Highfield is Editor of New Scientist and a member of the Festival advisory group.

Other compelling events

Understanding Excess
Exploring the Authistic Mind
Psychology of War: from Shell Shock to PTSD