British Interactive Group - Newsletter - Spring 1998

"Here's Looking at Euclid"

The Idea It‘s a funny old life this exhibits building lark and one‘s sources of inspiration are not always under one‘s full control. Exhibit ideas can come from a new component, “I know just what I could do with this!” or a sponsor‘s product “Wizzo Widgets are the most exciting product for the Twenty-first century” or a neglected corner of the National Curriculum for Science “ We really should show Blogg’s Effect to the Key Stage 1‘s”

This one came from none of these sources and I‘ve never actually made a complete version of it for Techniquest. Still I offer it to the world together with the account of its origin, in the hope that someone somewhere will be inspired to take it further.

Techniquest uses titles for all its exhibits, these are in part genuinely instructive and in part a demonstration that scientists are not old fuddy-duddys (or sad ba@*ards for those of us below a certain age). This, in Techniquest, takes the form of appalling puns for example Cagey Creatures for our stick insects, part because; they are “cagey” they hide from you, they are in cages and the exhibit was devised by Ken (KG) Gleason. Imagine my sadness when I had a great pun but no exhibit idea to go with it. Inspiration came when I attended an Exhibit Developers Workshop at the Exploratorium in 1991. They were planning their navigation show and this exhibit idea arose from a short thought experiment.

Imagine you are in an incredibly fast plane flying along the equator due west. Using equally incredible air brakes you subject yourself to massive G-forces by turning through 90 degrees to fly due North until you reach the North Pole where you turn again through 90 degrees to head due south. Here there is a problem, in that every direction is due south but bear with me, the turn is through 90 degrees whatever the resulting direction may be. Your wonder plane flies due south to the equator turns through 90 degrees and heads due west again until it joins up with its original flight path. The resulting path is a three-sided figure with three 90 degree turns giving a 270 degree triangle.

This is only possible because you are on the surface of a sphere, the Earth. Even more amazingly real navigation does work this way! Euclid defined geometry on a plane so this is non-Euclidean hence the title.

At the same workshop, Stuart Kollhagen of Questacon considerably improved the idea by cutting a square bottomed U-shape out of paper. When it is laid on the sphere the ends match up to make a triangle, so this is the unbent 270-degree triangle.

The exhibit was then made from a plastic globe filled with parcel foam. The triangle was made from thin urethane sheet and given a stand with a flat square around which the “triangle” fitted.

Critique This is a one shot, one point exhibit, or didacteractive, which may only lead to confusion if presented to children at the wrong time in their mathematical education. It‘s fine for an exhibition on Navigation or Map Projections presented to an interested audience but for the wrong audience at the wrong time it could be deeply damaging. For these reasons I‘ve never made it for Techniquest but perhaps you can add the extra twist or insight which makes it worth building properly. For me I am still put in mind of the ancient exhibit fabricator‘s lament, “There‘s an exhibit in there somewhere”.

Finally my colleagues in the Techniquest Design Office would like the world to know that the foregoing is all Harry White‘s own work and that they told him not to anyway.

Submitted by Harry White, Exhibitions Director, Techniquest, Stuart Street, Cardiff, CF1 6BW, Wales. Phone 44 1222 475475. Fax 44 1222 482517 Email Harry@tquest.org.uk

Newsletter Spring 1998 Contents



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