The real as launchpad

 Yesterday I went to London to visit the Science Museum's Science Fiction exhibition.  The last SF exhibition I went to was at the Barbican in 2014, and that turned out to be disappointing.

The Science Museum's exhibition delivered in its promise.  The designers had cleverly chosen an AI to be the guide/narrator of the exhibition.  This gave the chance to have an outsider observer on humans, their science and their culture.  And it gave the designers the opportunity to set up dozens of audio-visual displays with this AI character all around the exhibition.  Those introduced ideas and gave the exhibition a vibrant feel.  The audio/visual broke up the static exhibits with their usual museum labels.

Calling the exhibition science fiction actually did it a disservice.  It was so much more than that.  The exhibition used the real world of science and tech and human culture to discuss unreal elements.  Which is just how SF writers work.  We take real science and physical constraints, and we write around them.

One clever use of this in the exhibition was the discussion of faster-than-light travel.  Everyone is familiar with the Enterprise going to warp speed.  We've grown up with it.  But alongside a model of the Enterprise sat an explanation of the Alcubierre drive.  Alcubierre's mathematical model theoretically proves that the light speed barrier can be circumvented.  Effectively, his model theorises stretching out space behind your ship and shrinking it in front of you.  Your ship stays in a bubble of normal space-time and does not violate the lightspeed limit.

That sounds like sleight-of-hand, but it is a real scientific theory, and quite tricky to get your head around.  But the exhibition had a simple diagrammatic explanation and a short animation to explain it.  It was a virtuoso example of how to educate and entertain at the same time.

The exhibition covered hard science topics like the search for exoplanets (over 5,000 already discovered), planets occulting stars, and cryogenic medical tech.  And yes, a version of it is already being trialled for astronauts.

Film props like Darth Vader's helmet sat alongside spacesuits from films, and a replica of an Apollo-era real astronaut's suit.

In the section on space flight also sat three rocket motors which were from real vehicles, including one from the Saturn V which lifted the Apollo astronauts into orbit.   I saw the whole thing 30+ years ago on a tour of Cape Canaveral, and it is massive.  Even one engine nozzle gave you a sense of its scale.

The exhibition also tackled climate issues, and that's where having an observer AI was genius.  It could get across conservation points we might consider preaching from another human.

I didn't learn anything new, which confirmed for me how broad my knowledge is, but if you weren't as steeped in SF as I am you would've learned lots.  And been really well entertained as you learned.  Bravo, Science Museum, for an excellent exhibition.