Presenting science as art with interactive experiments.

May 11, 2008 on 5:32 pm | In culture, ethics, science | 2 Comments

This year, I’ll make my fourth trip to Black Rock City, Nevada for the annual Burning Man arts festival, which is, to understate, a bacchanalian explosion of radical self-expression. It’s also a pretty wicked extreme camping experience, set on a flat, alkaline plane of dust at 4,000 feet above sea level. Temperatures can soar to 44° C in direct sunlight during the daytime, and drop to around 5° C at night. The elevation causes you to receive a higher dose of UV radiation; this means unprotected skin burns faster. On windy days, there can be sudden gusts at speeds in excess of 120 km/h. All that said, it’s a fantastic experience—visitors are almost certain to witness the most gaudy, gauche, irreverent, and sublimely beautiful art they’ve ever seen. It’s a commerce-free event; although tickets are pricey (it costs a lot to build the city’s temporary infrastructure), nothing is allowed to be bought or sold once you’re inside the city limits. Black Rock City is built rapidly each year, with the overwhelming majority of the work occurring in the week before and the week of the event. The Leave No Trace ethic is fundamental to Burning Man, and each year the federal Bureau of Land Management gives accolades to the Burning Man organization for its remarkably thorough cleanup and restoration efforts.

Another important ethic at Burning Man is participation. It is not a spectator event – the subject/object dichotomy is constantly under attack, and this is generally agreed to be a good thing. However, in each of my past three attendances, I contributed relatively little to the overall interactive wacky-ness of Burning Man. This year I want to do something special to participate, and I have an idea of what it is. I want to perform (and invite onlookers to help me perform) science experiments. The point is to teach the value of skepticism and the scientific method, while having an entertaining time. I haven’t settled on any particular experiments, yet. So, dear readers, here’s where you come in. I need your input!

Please tell me your most memorable childhood experience involving a science experiment. Maybe it was something mom, dad, or a cool aunt or uncle showed you. Maybe it was a science teacher at school doing something wacky in the classroom. Maybe it was something you saw Mr. Wizard do on Nickelodeon. It doesn’t matter where you saw it. I’m looking for the most visual, most thought provoking, and most entertaining experiments you can recall. Once I get at least a short list together, I’ll start performing some of them to get a good idea of how practical they’d be to perform in the desert environment. If I can, I’ll record videos of them and post them here on Survival Machine. If you want to help me perform it (and even appear in the video) just let me know. I’d also gladly welcome video submissions of you performing the experiment yourself. If anyone actually does that, I’ll make a post just to feature your video!

So, brainstorm, and let me know what you remember from the exciting world of science experiments!