Let’s start at the very beginning
Running until the 30 October as part of the 2016 Sydney Science Festival, the world’s greatest science experiment – the Large Hadron Collider – is being recreated at the Powerhouse Museum. CERN’s Collider is the work of 10,000 men and women from across the globe, united in their quest to learn more about the building blocks that make up our universe and the laws that govern their behaviour. It’s the world’s largest particle accelerator or the not-so-little machine that attempts to recreate the conditions immediately following the Big Bang. It was this ambitious experiment in 2012 that discovered the Higgs boson (the ‘God Particle’), capturing the public’s imagination like few other science endeavours in the past 50 years. Sound a bit like scientist gobbledygook? Well, consider this: just one- eighth of its distribution system would qualify as the world’s largest fridge. When in operation, trillions of protons race around the Collider accelerator ring 11, 245 times a second, travelling at 99.9999991% the speed of light... so basically, it’s one of the coolest frontiers in modern- day science and will even keep hard-to-please teens engrossed.
Adventure time
The Queensland Museum’s Sciencentre has five action stations for kiddie learning dedicated to all things positively science for some hands- on, minds- on and body- on fun. Create beautiful patterns with curly tiles, use your own energy to switch on a light, take a spin on the wacky pendulum, see to infinity and beyond in the lights corridor and listen to a measly rubber thong make sweet melodies on the quirky Thongophone.
Afterwards, make your way to Measure Island, a fictional land filled with monuments and statues built by a long-lost civilisation. However, this is not your usual island: every step takes you to a new puzzle waiting to be solved and to teach you more about measurements in your day-to- day life. Test the speed of your throw, get your heart racing and measure your heartbeat while encountering your worst fears, watch a diamond disappear before your very eyes, and join characters Archy and his dog Cubit as they discover the secrets of time, density, buoyancy, temperature, speed and volume.