Mark Shirchenko about the Science and Technology Festival Homo Science in Nizhny Novgorod
We asked Mark to tell us what was going on there.
“The Homo Science festival was organized by a joint team of the Atomic Energy Information Centres (AEICs) from different cities, brought together by Maxim Grevtsev, a program director of the AEIC network. The festival was a success,” says Mark Shirchenko.
The event was held in the open air during three days. On the first day, a digital footprint and artificial intelligence were discussed (lecture by Artur Khachuyan), and also cognitive distortions, tricks of our brain, unraveled by the science educator Alexander Panchin and illusionist Nikolay Fomushin. The second day began with the “Scientific Wake-Up Exercises” led by the coach Yulia Beresikova, along with the cardiologist and blogger Alexey Utin. Then, Mark Shirchenko gave a talk on “The Big Bang Theory” and Evgeniya Timonova lectured on evolution and intellect. The second festival day ended with the concert “String theory and Practice: World’s Hits with an Electric Violin”. On the third day, an open city tournament in the “What? Where? When?” game was held, and also a popular science marathon (presenters A. Pushnoy and S. Malozemov).
And it was only the main programme. How many intriguing and fascinating things were there on the festival site! Even the talk of Mark Shirchenko was given not in a usual lecture format.
“You see, at first I wanted to give a lecture, but then Maxim Grevtsev had an idea to talk about science and the sitcom via questions and answers in the format of the “What? Where? When?” game, especially since a qualifying round of this game was set the next day.”
And there were a roulette wheel and a table with thirteen sectors for questions. Ten of them were about the sitcom episodes related to different science topics and concepts: the Large Hadron Collider, graphene, string theory, the Doppler effect, etc., one of them was a set of rapid-fire questions about the sitcom characters and situations, the next one was reserved for a question from the audience and the last one – specially for Mark – was about neutrino physics.
We asked Mark whether it was a game “The audience vs the expert”. “No way,” laughs Mark, "rather “The expert vs ignorance”. By the way, I’ve lost in answering the set of rapid-fire questions.
I was asked by someone whether it was always easy to translate the sitcom or I had to delve into materials and learn new topics. I believe it is like with a foreign language – one can never learn English entirely just as one can never learn physics entirely. By the way, the first thing I stumbled over translating the sitcom, was the Aharonov–Bohm effect. I had to read about it.
I didn’t succeed in everything I tried to explain to the audience. For example, string theory was well understood, and the Doppler effect not at all. And I thought it was so easy...
We communicated with Maxim and the audience in the breaks between questions. I liked the format, so did the viewers.
On the whole, this festival reminded me of wonderful JINR Physics Days: experiments were shown (but in Dubna by schoolchildren while in Nizhny Novgorod by adults), there were also public lectures, different workshops, liquid nitrogen experiments. It was great that the organizers thought out many interactive formats, for example, one freestyler recited science rap. The viewers gave him topics, and he freestyled.”
The target audience of the festival was the widest one, from schoolchildren to adults. Despite the fact that it was held on workdays, there were a lot of people on the site, especially towards evening.
“People walked up, got interested and asked questions. I talked about the neutrino physics project of the Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems which I’m involved in and also about our Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. I enjoyed the festival a lot. It was really great and interesting!”
Photo by the AEIC of Nizhny Novgorod
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