2nd March Big Science Saturday
Online ticket sales have ended. There are tickets available on the door all day.
From the concept of infinity to the common garden slug, join us on Big Science Saturday for a vast variety of talks encompassing a huge variety of fields within Science.
In the theatre talks will be roughly 45 minutes followed by Q&As. In the Debatable room next door there will be shorter 15 minute talks followed by either breaks or round-table debates.
Plus LOL will be about continuing their laughter research to see if you can tell a real smile from a fake one.
Saturday 2nd March
10am - 5:30pm Sallis Benney Theatre, 58-67 Grand Parade, Brighton, BN2 0JY
Tickets £10/£6 on the door.
10.15am Infinity
Infinity worries people. They drowned the man who first thought of it. Another was driven mad. Brian Clegg demonstrates its paradoxes and its usefulness. Infinity has challenged the finest minds of science and mathematics: Archimedes, Fibonacci, Galileo, Newton, Mandelbrot, perhaps even you. Prepare to enter a world of paradox.
11.30am Noise: A Human History of Sound & Listening
Echoes in caves, disembodied voices in shamanistic rituals, secret signals in the jungle, the gurgles of the body, the din of the battlefield: the historian of sound and listening, David Hendy, offers five soundbites from history that show how we keep being tricked and misled by sound – and how we’ve used sound to fool and manipulate others.
12.45pm Extremes: Life, death and the limits of the human body
Drawing on his own experiences in trauma surgery as an anaesthetist and intensvie care expert, EXTREMES is Dr Kevin Fong’s account of the way cutting-edge medicine is pushing back at the limits of human survival. Kevin is well known for his TV documentaries such as How to Mend a Broken Heart, Back from the Dead and Trauma: A&E.
2pm Mark Thompson: The People’s Astronomer
Mark takes us on a journey through time and space to see how our view of the Universe has changed over the centuries. He discusses some of the ingenious experiments that finally revealed our place in the Universe and offers some practical advice for anyone wishing to see the beauty of the Universe for themselves.
3.15pm Inside Shakespeare’s Medicine Cabinet
Drugs feature heavily in Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, for example. Shakespeare was unusually well versed in the traditional herbal lore of his day, but how well did he know his herbs, did they actually perform as he claimed and can we recreate the effects today? An entertainment with actors and pharmacologists.
From the British Pharmacological Society.
4.30pm The Seven Ages of Man
A journey through Shakespeare’s “Seven ages of man”. From the moment you’re born to your very last breath, your body undergoes many dramatic changes, and your hormones play a starring role. How and why do your hormones behave differently through life? A whistle-stop tour of hormones from the cradle to the grave. With The Society for Endocrinology.
11am Can We Travel Through Time? The 20 Big Questions of Physics (Debate Table)
Time travel! Falling apples! Dead cats! Parallel worlds! Free lunches! Michael Brooks has set out to answer the 20 big questions of physics.
12pm What Has Nature Ever Done For Us? (Debate Table)
The most impressive machine on earth is Nature itself. But as we play with it, we are putting it under stress. Tony Juniper shows us some surprising unintended consequences.
1pm Project Sunshine (Debate Table)
Can the sun provide sustainable food and energy for the entire world? Tony Ryan and Steve McKevitt believe it can, eliminating the need for ‘fossilized sunshine’ in the form of coal, oil and gas.
2pm A Slow Passion (Debate Table)
When BBC Radio 4′s Material World programme announced a search for the UK’s top amateur scientist, little did anyone expect that the winning experiment would be by Ruth Brooks, who posed this question: Do snails have a homing instinct? The nation was gripped by the unexpected thesis and by the extraordinary results, which will change our attitude to the humble pests.
3pm Cracked (Debate Table)
Why is psychiatry such big business? James Davies has investigated the failings of modern psychiatry and argues how the practice must change to win trust back.
LOL
What is laughter? What happens when we laugh? Laughter Lab are a team of cognitive neuroscientists & comedians trying to find out whether you can tell a real laugh from a fake one. The experiment happens today, the explanation tomorrow.
Myths, Morphs and Memes
‘Groupmind’ is a collaborative experiment looking at the way we communicate with the next generation. The ‘next generation’ here being perhaps the other people the room, or the next people to come into the room. The experiment has several strands, using spaghetti towers, map-making, picture consequences and other novel ways to transmit ideas, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
City Books
Full range of popular science books for young and old.
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