Gravity Fields Festival!

As you know, a festival in Grantham is being held to celebrate 350 years since Isaac Newton's Year Of Wonders. The festival is called Gravity Fields. In my last post, I wrote about the first show to start off the festival: Ockham's Razor. The rest of the weekend was packed full of Isaac Newton themed events and shows.

The first part of the festival that we saw on Saturday was the Anti-Gravity Box. The box was decorated to look like it was flipped on its side. When you had your picture taken inside the box, it looked like gravity didn't affect you! It was a bit disorientating but it was quite a lot of fun to try to come up with creative poses!

Shortly after having our pictures taken in the Anti-Gravity Box, we saw a talk about maths from the author and scientist, Simon Singh. The talk was themed around The Simpsons. Before the talk began, I couldn't understand how you could have a maths talk about The Simpsons, however, once Simon started explaining all of the hidden maths references in the show, I realised that there were loads of things to do with maths.

Quite a few of the directors and writers of The Simpsons are mathematicians, so they liked to slip a few maths jokes in every now and again.

The next show was very unique. It took place in a little van with a tent attached to it for the audience. Since me and father arrived to the show early, we got to sit inside the van, right next to the man who was performing. The performance was all about the first trip to the Moon. The man played Michael Collins, the third man who went up to the Moon in the Apollo 11 spacecraft. Michael, however, did not land on the Moon. He was left in the spacecraft, unable to contact anybody, for 48 minutes while he orbited the dark side of the Moon. He actually went around the Moon multiple times as Neil and Buzz explored the Moon on foot. During the 48 minutes while he orbited the moon he played his guitar, he ate snacks, and contemplated life.
Just based on this story, the show sounds very serious. The man made the talk quite the opposite, though. He sang, played his guitar, joked around, danced and played music for us. For one part of the show, he had me hold a microphone for him and father hold a torch, while he gazed out of the van window as if it really was a spaceship window. I was desperately trying to stop laughing! It didn't help that the man who led everyone to the van was laughing his head off beside me.

Even though the show was really light-hearted and funny, I definitely learnt a lot about the first mission to the Moon.

For the final show, we saw Dr Death and his Rat teach us all about doctors and surgeons in the 17th century. He explained how the answer to any sort of medical condition was bleeding. As you can probably imagine, it didn't work very well and a lot of people died from illness and injury back then. The illness that killed the most people was the Great Plague. There was no cure for the plague and the people didn't really know how to prevent it. There was no such thibg as hygiene then so the plague spread quickly. People thought it was passed from person to person through smells, so they wore masks with scented flowers inside to try to stop themselves from getting infected. The plague was actually spread by rats and their fleas!  To help explain all of this, Dr Death had a little rat puppet who liked to sing and interrupt Dr Death. He was very funny! There was a lot of maggots, blood and drinking urine!
Saturday was the Ingenious Night Out with street performers, fierce fire-blowing machines and rainbow umbrellas. The streets of Grantham were very busy and noisy!

I wonder what Isaac Newton would have made of it all!







Isaac Newton Statue in Grantham