The first Liverpool Science Festival (UK)  is being held June 25 – July 9, 2014 according to a June 6, 2014 Festival announcement, which has a very exciting lineup guests and events,

Liverpool Science Festival was founded with the mission to create a unique platform to engage the public in all things scientific – from natural science to science in its most interdisciplinary and cultural contexts.

For 2014, we are part of the science programme of events during the UK’s inaugural International Festival for Business (IFB 2014). We are also proud to be contributing events to the official 60th Anniversary celebrations of CERN – birthplace of the internet, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), site of the discovery of the Higgs Boson – and home to scientists from more than 100 countries.

Highlights of the festival include:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Solar System:
1 river, 9 planets, 14 days and 70 miles

An ambitious public engagement project setting off from the source of the Mersey on a journey to the sea, culminating in a series of pop-up astronomy events and happenings which will mark out the positions of the planets and a scale model of the Solar System. The journey begins on 25 June with astronomy at the source of the Mersey (Stockport, Cheshire) and ends on the evening of 9 July on Crosby Beach.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-solar-system

This is the second reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’ve had on this blog in less than one week. Rice University (US) researcher, Nikta Fakhri, referenced the book in a description of her work on carbon nanotubes in a June 5, 2014 post titled, Hitchhikers at the nanoscale show how cells stir themselves. (For anyone unfamiliar with the book and/or its cultural import, here’s a Wikipedia entry devoted to it.)

Next the festival is featuring its physics with two live events, one featuring Jon Butterworth and the other featuring Butterworth and Lyn Evans (from the announcement),

“If you want to know what being a professional scientist is really like, read Smashing Physics!” – Professor Brian Cox

Professor Jon Butterworth (CERN {European Organization for Nuclear Research ], UCL [University College of London] & Guardian Science) at Waterstones Liverpool One on 27 June – one of the UK’s foremost physicists, on Smashing Physics, his smashing new science book about the hunt for Higgs Boson and real life as a real scientist at the cusp of scientific discovery.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/smashing-physics-ft-prof-jon-butterworth  

Dr Lyn Evans (chief engineer at CERN who spent 15 years leading the team constructing the LHC, the most complex machine ever built) flies in from CERN, Geneva, to speak on Engineering the LHCon 28 June at Stanley Dock.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/engineering-the-lhc-ft-prof-jon-butterworth-dr-lyn-evans

Butterworth has a blog, Life and Physics, hosted by the Guardian newspaper as part of its science blog network. I find his writing to be quite approachable. From time to time he starts talking in ‘physics’ but he usually prepares his audience for these brief outbursts by explaining the concept first in plain English and/or approaching the topic from a mundane angle, e.g., ‘it can be lonely being a physicist’.

Evans was in Vancouver, Canada last February 2013 to launch a global project (from a Feb. 18, 2013 news release posted on The Exchange),

… On February 21 [2013], TRIUMF will do its part in fulfilling this role as it plays host to a meeting of the leaders of the major high-energy physics laboratories around the world. The key outcome of this meeting will be the completion of an existing global collaboration and the launch of a new team that will coordinate and advance the global development work for the Linear Collider, the world’s next accelerator project aimed at pulling back the curtain on the secrets of nature’s most innermost workings.

The new Linear Collider Collaboration (LCC) will combine the two next-generation collider projects, the International Linear Collider (ILC) and the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), under one organizational roof and will be headed by Lyn Evans, former Project Manager of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Some may recognize Lyn Evans as recent co-recipient of the Milner Foundation’s Fundamental Physics Prize. (Evans will give a public science lecture on Wednesday evening at Science World.)

The Linear Collider Board, headed by the University of Tokyo’s Sachio Komamiya, is a new oversight committee for the LCC that will take up office at the same time.

Evans’ public talk mentioned in my Jan. 29, 2013 posting of Vancouver science events features a description that resembles the one for the Liverpool Science Festival (from my posting),

There is a video of the Evan’s February 20, 2013 talk here for anyone who can’t get to Evans’ talk in Liverpool.

Here’s more from the Liverpool Science Festival announcement,

“Wax has an extraordinary mind, and she has brought it to bear with her trademark wit.” – Stephen Fry

Ruby Wax brings her unique wit to the festival with her Sane New World stage show, at Stanley Dock on the evening of 28 June. Since obtaining a Masters Degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University, Wax has become a respected campaigner for mental illness in the UK.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/sane-new-world-ft-ruby-wax

“As the scouts say – be prepared! Say your prayers that you never need this book” – Bear Grylls

Dr Lewis Dartnell presents The Knowledge, How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, his guide to everything you need to know to survive the apocalypse, avert another Dark Age and accelerate the rebuilding of civilization. Based on Dartnell’s best-selling book which has been the top-selling science book on Amazon in recent weeks.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratch-ft-dr-lewis-dartnel 

For the last highlight from the festival announcement, we return to physics,

“Mind-blowing.” – New York Times on Particle Fever

Screening of Particle Fever – Liverpool Science Festival has special permission to screen this new movie on CERN and the hunt for the Higgs Boson, three months ahead of its UK general release. The screening will be followed by a Q&A featuring Professor Tara Shears, CERN particle physicist and the University of Liverpool’s first ever female professor of physics. The screening takes place on the evening of 5 July at Stanley Dock.

www.liverpoolsciencefestival.com/particle-fever

“Particle Fever” received its May 16, 2014 Canadian premiere in Vancouver, which included a discussion with a panel of physicists.  (There was a also a showing when the Vancouver International Film Festival was held in Oct. 2013 and that has a separate webpage description. I assume a showing during a film festival is not considered a premiere) Here’s a description of the documentary from the Vancouver International Film Festival theatre’s Particle Fever webpage,

May 16th, 7:00 PM screening will be followed by a panel discussion of physicists, copresented by TRIUMF and supported by Reel Causes.
May 19th, 6:30 PM screening is open to youth, the film is rated PG

Imagine being able to watch as Edison turned on the first light bulb, or as Franklin received his first jolt of electricity. Physicist turned filmmaker Mark Levinson gives us the modern equivalent of those world-changing moments with this as-it-happens front-row seat to our generation’s most significant and inspiring scientific breakthrough—the launch of the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, built to recreate conditions that existed just moments after the Big Bang and to potentially explain the origin of all matter. Following a team of brilliant scientists, Levinson—aided by master editor Walter Murch—crafts a celebration of discovery while revealing the very human stories behind this epic machine.

“Set in crummy offices and towering facilities worthy of a Bond movie, the documentary is edited with the momentum of a thriller by the great Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now), as we follow six scientists. They come across as simultaneously passionate thinkers and endearing nerds: There’s the elegant Italian physicist and classical pianist Fabiola Gianotti, obliviously stepping into traffic while talking excitedly on her phone. Or postdoc student and experimental physicist Monica Dunford, declaring effusively: “It’s unbelievably fantastic how great data is.”

There is a Particle Fever May 14, 2014 review by Ken Eisner in the Vancouver local publication, The Georgia Straight.  Peculiarly and in the midst a poetic movie review, Eisner starts complaining about physics funding in the US,

In the rarefied world of quantum physics, “The ability to leap from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the key to success.” This is according to one scientist prominently featured in an absorbing doc that takes as its locus the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland, where some pretty amazing breakthroughs—and a few duds—have happened in the past few years.

The subtext is the struggle to keep pure learning alive with no promise of tangible return, except the possibility of knowledge that will forever alter our understanding of life. …

…

… its main activities take place at the huge site of CERN, near Lake Geneva—built there largely because right-wingers have managed to kill off nonprofit science in the U.S. [emphasis mine] Its hivelike realities, with staff drawn from a hundred nations, make it resemble a space station on Earth. …

I think there may have been a few other important  factors influencing the Large Hadron Collider’s location.

Getting back to Liverpool, if the website is any indication, this science festival has been beautifully conceptualized and thoughtfully implemented. I wish the organizers all the best as they get ready to launch their festival.

Finally, in the description of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Solar System event, I noticed a reference to the Mersey, which brought to mind this song from 1965. Gerry & the Pacemakers sing Ferry Cross the Mersey,