It’s eleven o’clock on a rainy Saturday morning. What would usually be a sleepy St. George campus is, at the moment, a medley of PhDs and kids in lab coats. The place is buzzing, even under threatening skies.
From archaeology to astrophysics, the city-wide Science Rendezvous has something for everyone. As I make my way through the Science Carnival on St. George Street, I encounter a lab coat-clad volunteer who asks if I know what a polymer is, and whether I want to make silly putty. In a live chemistry cooking show, I witness can-can-dancing carbohydrates and get to taste apple pie made without apples.
In the street, I’m accosted by Einstein and what seems to be a molecule on legs. Marie Curie follows in tow. The biology pavilions are bustling as people line up to measure their lung capacity, take part in a cell lab, or check out the glow-in-the-dark worms.
Further on, the technology tents are displaying U of T’s latest robots and video games from the Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering departments. At the physical sciences pavilion, people are making planispheres and checking out the liquid nitrogen train. Volcano Alley has—you guessed it—volcanoes on display, that go off every hour.
That wraps up the St. George carnival, but the science doesn’t stop there. The espionage-themed Amazing Science Chase has teams running around campus solving problems and finding clues, all with a scientific twist.
Over in Hart House, the day-long SciBarCamp has scientists, artists, and technologists discussing everything from consciousness to the social impacts of smart technologies. Most accurately described as an open-science “unconference,” the event consists of break-out sessions of previously selected discussion topics. In its second year, SciBarCamp has already gone a long way to attracting wider audiences to discuss science, and has its next instalment coming up in Palo Alto, California this July.
The brainchild of U of T chemistry and physics professor Dwayne Miller, Science Rendezvous is proof that science is important for everyone—not just scientists.
“Without science, our world could not advance,” said Charles Darwin, wandering down St. George Street. “For example, if I hadn’t come up with the concept of ordinal species, then everyone would still be wondering where we came from.”
What’s more, Science Rendezvous helps to strip away the barrier of complexity surrounding many scientific concepts, making them accesxsible to a wider audience.
“A big problem in our society is that there’s not a lot of understanding of science,” said event volunteer and undergraduate science student Ashley Quan. “People don’t see it as fun, or interesting, or accessible, and so they leave it in the hands of other people to make decisions for them. But science is integral to every part of our lives, and people should have a greater understanding of it. Science is really fun, and hopefully Science Rendezvous will help people realize that.”
