Festival: Brighton Science Festival, various venues, Brighton, February 7-28 2010
The Brighton Science Festival may have picked an opportune moment to begin, launching with a Family Fun weekend coinciding with half-term, but the appeal of this three-week campaign stretches beyond kids and classrooms.
Touting itself as "science for non-scientists", it aims for genuine inclusivity by taking dating chemistry to pubs and debates on the merits of polymaths (the ingenious tribe of boffin-brained geniuses most often symbolised by Leonardi da Vinci) to bars.
The Festival targets an audience who might not normally embrace science
"When I finished my studies I went into busking and television work," Richard Robinson, the festival founder who only expanded his own interest in the field when his children started asking the questions, has said. A parental trip to the Science Museum simultaneously left him cold and inspired his idea.
"I noticed the people there didn't have the patter of a busker, although they certainly had better props. So I thought it would be brilliant to bring the two together."
Dozens of local schools and universities will be taking part again this year
Now in its sixth year, the festival has hit a few hitches – an enormous replica of a prehistoric flying reptile almost got lost in the post when it was winged in from India in 2007, and a 900kg spaceball used to train recruits by NASA was stolen from a council storage yard in 2008 – but the popularity and scope of the programme has leapt each year.
The theme this time around is Incredible Machines, marking the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, the organisation which replaced old superstitions with precise science in a world newly dazzled by Isaac Newton's law of physics.
Wind turbines and spaghetti towers are part of the plan for 2010
If offers to build wind turbines and spaghetti towers during the opening weekend sound complicated, the chances are they'll actually reflect a key aspect of the Festival, revealing the surprising simplicity of apparently complex processes.
Life, the Universe and Everything will show how the nuances of floral evolution and football crowd chants work under the same basic laws, and showpiece bash the Big Science Saturday puts leopard spots, zebra stripes and the human heartbeat down to plain old laboratory logic.
The Microbes and Me exhibition will introduce visitors to the tiny heroes which make up 90% of their bodies in an exhibition at Brighton's Jubilee Library
There are also operas, skill swaps, an exhibition in the impressive Jubilee Library and a day of talks and demonstrations pondering everything from the sun being made of bananas to humanity's dependence on music.
Robinson sounds suitably anatomical when he speaks of the "big hole" he saw in the market for the festival, and he's persuaded high-profile figures such as Robert Winston, Guardian writer Polly Toynbee and insiders from the Large Hadron Collider project to take to the stage for 2010.
Robert Winston is one of the familiar expert faces appearing during the three-week festival, discussing the mixed success of human inventions across the centuries
"They give interesting talks but can then field questions from people," he says.
"It is serious fun. You can't help but smile when you see people's reactions. You can tell they didn't expect to enjoy it."
Check out the Festival programme for full details.
