Viva Brighton Issue #48 February 2017

INTERVIEW
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MYbrighton: Richard Robinson
Brighton Science Festival founder
Are you local? Yes. I’ve lived in Brighton the last
15 or 20 years… I wish I’d got here sooner.
What do you like most about Brighton? It’s
a very lively, open-minded, alert kind of a place.
Everyone is very bright-eyed and they accept and
welcome change. Which is personified in Caroline
Lucas. People say ‘okay, this is the new reality, let’s
just take a deep breath and get down to it.’
What’s your favourite place in the city? There’s
no place like home. I can come out of my front
door and, until recently, I could look out to sea and
say ‘ahhh, look at the endless expanse of the ocean’.
Now I can say ‘ahhh, look, windmills!’ It’s a bit of
a pity that the endless expanse is not there but, if
we’re going to have this electricity, we can either
send people down into holes in the ground to dig
up coal and ruin the atmosphere, or we can build
wind turbines out in the ocean and say that’s us doing
that. I like the second one.
What’s your favourite restaurant? I’m not very
good at eating and drinking. I eat to live rather than
the other way around and I’m practically teetotal.
The best thing about the Science Festival is that I
need to go to places where I can be intellectually
stimulated. Places like the Catalyst Club, obviously,
Philosophy in Pubs, and Nerd Night.
What does Brighton need more of? I’m part
of The Sunday Assembly. I’m quite committed to
it, because what we do need in the world is more
altruism, more generosity, more empathy for others.
It’s always a bit embarrassing on Sunday to say we
ought to be getting together but we can’t because
the getting togetherness has been usurped by those
of faith and you have to have that faith before you
can cluster. The idea of The Sunday Assembly is
that you can cluster without the faith, and we do.
What led you to set up the Brighton Science
Festival? I used to be a busker, and I enjoyed dancing
around making people laugh. Then I started science
busking in schools. Matt Parker of the Festival
of the Spoken Nerd invented maths busking, which
is even more impossible. It was an hour and a half
of very funny stuff, and at the end I shook my head
and thought, ‘good grief, that was maths!’ It’s possible
to turn anything funny, so I set up the Science
Festival to get kids more interested and engaged.
Is Brighton a good place to be a scientist?
There’s a big scientific community, but when we
started the festival people said ‘it’s an arts city’
and ‘you can’t use science and festival in the same
sentence’. But, once off the ground, they could see
that not only was it fun, it was useful too. People
leave Bright Sparks, our big bean-feast at half term,
going, ‘woah… that was… strange’, and one or two
bits are left behind. If you’re under seven, what we
call science, you just say is magic. Experiencing
something very briefly early on in your life makes it
easier for you to engage with it later on. We build
models of molecules with you, and you go home
having played with weird-looking Lego. But, later
on, when you’re studying chemistry and you meet
the models again, you say ‘oh I recognise that’ and
it’s part of, as it were, your DNA. This February
is all for the kids. They’re going to experience the
most extraordinary circus.
Where would you live if you didn’t live here?
The difficulty of living anywhere other than
Brighton is that everywhere else is a bit boring. It
doesn’t have the colour. When you walk down the
street here and look at the people you think ‘oh, the
circus is in town’. It’s the thinking man’s Blackpool.
Interview by Lizzie Lower
Bright Sparks takes place on 11th & 12th of February
at Hove Park School. brightonscience.com
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