Lab it up in Cambridge

Nine-day festival offers chance to seek out science

A young visitor checks out a Bengal tiger on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. (Ming Vandenberg)

Imagine building and launching your own water rocket, or creating a beetle nursery. How about the chance to have lunch every day for a week with a different Nobel laureate in science? Or take a museum tour led by a robot? These are all possibilities courtesy of the second annual Cambridge Science Festival, a nine-day citywide celebration aimed at making science and technology accessible and enlightening.

Taking place April 26-May 4 in venues all over the city, the festival features more than 200 events ranging from exhibits and performances to hands-on activities that bring scientific principles to life. Festival collaborators include the City of Cambridge, MIT, Harvard, the Museum of Science, and WGBH.

The festival is the brainchild of John Durant, director of the MIT Museum, who says he brought the idea with him when he arrived at the university from a British science center in 2005. "Festivals of science are relatively common in Europe and I was surprised to find none here," he says.

The inaugural festival last spring drew an estimated 15,000 people. Among its aims: to showcase Cambridge as a center of world class science and technology. "We want to open up Cambridge and celebrate what the city is brilliantly good at," says Durant.

Families will probably want to steer toward the two weekends that frame the festival, both packed with multi-age activities. The opening Science Carnival is April 26 at Cambridge City Hall from noon until 4 p.m. "There will be live animals in the basement, solar cars on the lawn outside, and some slightly spectacular things will happen out the upstairs windows," Durant promises.

He expects another family-oriented highlight to be North Cambridge Family Opera's American premiere of multimedia science oratorio "The Powers of Ten," which explores the scales of the universe, from sub-atomic to cosmic. The 90-minute, 21-song work, written by David Haines, involves a cast of nearly 50 adults and more than 100 children.

"We think of the arts as being expressive of human feelings, emotions, and aspirations, and think of science, wrongly, as cold, hard, and clinical. But the interface of art and science can have real personal significance," Durant says. The oratorio will be performed three times during the festival, beginning with a show Sunday April 27 at 6:30 p.m. at the Museum of Science.

Durant also recommends "Mystery at MIT," an augmented reality game using hand-held GPS-equipped computers that he believes will be ideal for parent-child teams, and "Cambridge Explores the Universe" at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, which allows visitors to become astronomers for the day. "Mystery at MIT" will be offered on May 3, "Cambridge Explores the Universe" on May 4.

One of the festival's biggest fans last year was Cambridge Councilwoman Henrietta Davis, who was a member of the organizing committee.

"I probably went to at least one thing almost every day," Davis says, "and there was a real spirit of adventure, discovery, and curiosity." For adults, Davis recommends Underground Railway Theater's fully-staged "QED," a play by Peter Parnell about the brilliant, eccentric quantum physicist Richard Feynman, beginning April 30 at MIT's Broad Institute.

When all is said and done, organizers hope the festival will have accomplished at least two major goals. "I hope we've switched on and surprised a lot of folks of all ages who thought they didn't have much interest in science," says Durant. "And I hope people that already know they're interested are given a better sense of the extraordinary creativity of their own community here in producing so much intriguing knowledge, so many fascinating inventions and applications."

Festival guides are available at museums throughout Cambridge. For more information visit CambridgeScienceFestival.org.