This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 17, 2011 - One might assume that anybody having the official title of "wonder instigator and relevance czar" would expect a few quizzical looks. When Clayton P. Moore wrote his unusual workplace designation he was hoping it would prompt more answers than questions.
"I wanted a title that explained not only what I do but how I do it," said Moore of Science Museum Oklahoma.
Certainly, no one has to explain what Moore does when he does it. Simply put, he makes things explode, a job he enjoys immensely.
"You don't have to really explain that 'aha' moment of the explosion," he said. "You don't have to say, 'This is why it's cool guys.'" Moore will get the chance to dispense some of those "aha" moments this week as SciFest gets underway at the St. Louis Science Center. The six-day annual event, now in its fourth year, will kick off on Tuesday with programs geared toward elementary school children, followed by three days of events for older students. The weekend schedule will open ticketing to the public while focusing on more general interest subject matter.
Programs over the course of SciFest include traditional subjects such as moon rocks, electric vehicles, fossils and nanotechnology as well as more eclectic topics such as the science of pizza, ice hockey, chickens and acupuncture. Saturday morning includes a special "welcome home" event for Belleville native Sandra Magnus who was aboard the historic final mission of the space shuttle Atlantis.
The daytime proceedings will be supplemented with special evening events including a Tuesday night St. Louis Symphony musical program, a Friday night "extravaganza" featuring buffets and an open bar and a Saturday "Family Fun Night."
The idea is modeled on the Cheltenham Festivals, a British charity that does annual programs on a variety of subjects.
Going in with a Bang
Moore does a number of explosions in his show including a standard combustion blast, a model of a jet engine and his most impressive blowup, an explosion of a half a liter of liquid nitrogen. The liquid expands to 400 times its size as it turns to a gas, causing 200 pounds a square inch of pressure to create a concussion so violent the container actually has burn marks, even without the introduction of any flame.
"Liquid nitrogen has a really wonderful theatrical component to it," Moore said. "The bottle actually melts apart. The molecules in the bottle push by each other so fast that it melts instead of ripping or tearing."
It's a routine Moore has done for more than 200,000 people over the past three years allowing his audience to use all their senses to understand the power of the big bangs he creates.
"Energy is energy -- whether it's light energy, whether it's heat energy, whether it's vibrations that you feel or hear," he said. "The ability to give the kids an opportunity to experience an explosion and be able to absorb the energy from it gives them a complete experience of that science phenomenon instead of just showing them something on a screen."
The purpose, Moore said, is not found in the blast itself but rather in the way it pulls children into the world of scientific exploration.
"Creating that positive association with science is really important so they don't just think it's something that other people do in other places or something that just happens in textbooks," he said. "It creates a conduit between the moment of wow and why that wow happens."
Red Rover, Red Rover
The Opportunity rover has celebrated more than seven-and-a-half years on Mars, and Raymond Arvidson counts that as pretty good.
Especially considering it was designed to last 90 days.
"It is way, way out of warranty," laughed Arvidson a deputy principal investigator with the project.
On Saturday, SciFest will present Roving Mars, an OMNIMAX film on the solar-powered machine and its twin rover Spirit. The rovers have spent years studying the nearby planet for signs of water and the possibility it may have once harbored life. Spirit ceased contact last year, but Opportunity rolls on.
Arvidson and Washington University, where he serves as a professor of Earth and planetary sciences, have both been involved from the start of the project. In fact, Arvidson was even on the imaging team for the Viking landers in the 1970s.
He views the desolate Martian landscape as a sort of laboratory writ large.
"We have a planetwide experiment in which there was water, sunlight, tectonic activity like Earth, but it was farther from the sun and a little smaller so the evolutionary path of the planet was slightly different," Arvidson said.
Evidence suggestive of water has been located. Opportunity has spent much of its life traversing former lakebeds billions of years old before climbing to the lip of an apparent impact crater this summer.
Meanwhile, Opportunity's sister, Spirit, died in the Columbia Hills.
"That's an ancient set of hills on the floor of a very old crater. We found a lot of evidence for ancient volcanic explosions that were charged by steam so the magma was interacting with either ground ice or ground water and exploding out under high pressure."
New rocks found on the surface seem to indicate a far more hospitable Mars existed in years gone by.
"The more we look for very old rocks, the more we find of very wet, warm conditions in the past," he said.
Arvidson said SciFest is a great opportunity for people to see the ongoing effort to reconstruct the Martian past -- and possibly understand how life came to evolve on our own world in the process. A new mission to Mars will launch, just after Thanksgiving, carrying Curiosity, a rover bigger than both its predecessors put together.
"It's incredibly important because the public's paying for this," he said. "They need to see what's happening and know what the benefit is for the cost."
Watt's Happening?
Gregg Maryniak has a special demonstration planned for his Saturday session on the future of energy. He will have his audience imagine picking up an apple from the floor and putting it down on a desk in front of them.
He said it would take seven Olympic athletes working at full tilt for an hour just to create a kilowatt.
Not that they'd make much money doing it at present utility rates.
"In Missouri, we give them each about one shiny penny," he said. "Our energy is very cheap. We live like gods in the U.S. and the developed world in general."
Peppering his talks with such descriptive analogies is likely second nature for Maryniak, who has done presentations at all four SciFests. This one will be no exception. In addition to his energy presentation, the chair of the energy department of Singularity University at NASA's Ames Research Center in California will host a Sunday talk on the future of the space program.
He believes events like SciFest are crucial to promoting scientific literacy.
"We need people who are conversant about the critical issues of the day," he said. "Things like energy and exploration are really at the forefront of what we need to do to stay vital as an economic engine. We're still the No. 1 economic power in the world, but we've seen in the past where other countries have turned their backs on research and exploration and they've faltered."
The fate of the space program is one area Maryniak hopes to combat misinformation. Despite media attention that has all but sounded its death knell due to a reorganization of priorities at NASA, Maryniak said nothing could be further from the truth. He recalls seeing a cover of the Economist which proclaimed the end of the Space Age.
"I was so mad I didn't buy the magazine," he said. "It's really going to be the dawn of the real Space Age because now it's going to be sustainable and not just a government hobby."
He said the annual Science Center event attracts participants from all over.
"It's an absolute treasure that folks in our region have," he said. "We've had people come from as far away as Lake Tahoe. People come from all over the country to visit because they see the value of it. I hope people in the neighborhood will see the value of it. It's such a bargain."
David Baugher is a freelance writer in St. Louis.