Sex up science (M&G)
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | Mail & Guardian column
fffzzzzzzz…zzzz…zzz… THUP!
A projectile the size of a child’s fist shot across the lawn and buried itself in a crouching rhododendron bush. It was summer in the early 1980s and we kids were home from school. My brother, his head crammed with potions learned in the science class, had cobbled together a handful of innocuous kitchen ingredients and turned them into something entirely more volatile.
The receptacle for this weapon of minimal destruction was our mum’s lovely ceramic vinegar jar, the projectile was its cork stopper.
Next, the barrel of a small brass cannon, made in a metalwork class, was primed with gunpowder.
DWAH!
The cannonball obliterated a rhododendron leaf and disappeared into the humus below, sending up a puff of rotting, musty earth.
Boys, I soon learned, had all the fun in science class.
The closest I came to burning anything in high school was the bottom of a saucepan in the standard six home economics class. The syllabus started with custard (made from scratch, not from a packet) and built to a culinary high point of … macaroni and cheese.
I did try to restore the gender bias once. It involved a tube of glue (CAUTION: FLAMMABLE!), a box of matches and the garage workbench. Wanting to see what all the fuss was about, I pressed a dollop of the stuff out on to the bench, touched a burning match to it and waited. At first the effect was utterly disappointing. A flame twirled and gyrated over the snot-coloured bead of glue … until the stuff started to boil. Lava bombs of flaming glue began arcing out across the bench, spawning sticky flamelets wherever they landed. I thrashed wildly at each of these with a filthy rag until they were all put out. It was terrifying. And utterly exhilarating.
Kids need to have a chance to blow things up every now and then. Not in that anti-social, Unabomber kind of way. Nor in a way that maims useful body parts. I mean in the kind of way that allows their smart, curious minds to deconstruct the world around them and build it up again, to figure out how things work. Understand how the universe is put together. Because when they do, they might learn to care why e = mc2.
A long time before that other renowned physicist Richard Feynman did the slice-’n-dice on atoms, developed quantum computing, conceived of nanotechnology and won a Nobel prize, he sat in his home as a teenager, tinkering with circuit boards and fuses, building radio sets and jury-rigging burglar alarms from bits and pieces. He nearly set fire to his room once.
A few months back the American television show, Wired Science, ran an episode in which it speculated that the very lack of opportunity for kids to build, concoct and blow up things might lie at the heart of the waning interest in science and noted that “the percentage of students pursuing college chemistry degrees [in the United States] today is down by two-thirds since the 1960s”.
In 1960s US toy stores carried home chemistry sets, veritable treasure chests of things that, when mixed correctly, would fizz, bang and pop through the house. But fears of safety in an increasingly litigious society have done away with the more exciting kits. The show also noted that images depicting scientists on modern-day kits, which don’t have any “real” chemicals anymore, are of scientists as clowns and goof-balls.
The scientist of the popular imagination has become the geek, the nerd, the joke of the class with bottle-thick glasses and the fashion sense of a pre-Cambrian trilobite.
Sexing down science isn’t good for society in the long term. We should be luring kids into the science class by sexing up its image — because the curiosity behind today’s exploding vinegar jar could find tomorrow’s cure for Aids or Stage IV cancer. If the day finally arrives, God forbid, that I get one of those creeping and incurable diseases that plague our world, I want to know that there are cathedral-sized labs out there packed to the gills with scientists trying to find a way to make me better.
It’s easy to fix a macaroni and cheese; just follow the recipe. It’s not that easy to fix Aids or final-stage cancer. So please, let’s have a little fizz bang to get our kids back into the science class. New ANC Youth League president Julius Malema might not care for it much (did he really try to discourage kids from going to their maths classes?) but one day, when he needs modern technology to save him or his political ambitions, maybe he, too, will see the value in it.
Leonie Joubert heads off to SciFest Africa in Grahamstown this weekend where she first cut her teeth as a science writer
(Originally published in the M&G, 22 April 2008)
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