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‘My friend went to look at the exhibition in St Magnus Hall, and she
spent all day there – that’s what they call the Discovery Dome, I think,
only they’ve got it inside the hall. It’s raised a lot of interest, you
know, this science festival.’ Well, there it was from the horse’s mouth
– or, at any rate, from the mouth of the taxi driver taking us back to the
airport. And the taxi driver is, of course, the first place to sound out
local opinion.

So, what’s new about a science festival? Nothing much, except that this
one was 30 kilometres north of the northernmost point of mainland Scotland,
in the thinly inhabited archipelago of islands known as Orkney (not ‘the
Orkneys’, on pain of being shunned by the Orcadians). The first Orkney Science
Festival, held last month, was possibly the most northerly science festival
in the world. It played to the islands’ 21 000 inhabitants – who are grossly
outnumbered by cattle and seaweed-eating sheep – and what tourists remain
at the end of September.

The mercurial and indefatigable director of the festival, Howie Firth,
says the tourists are the key to the future success of Orkney’s Science
Festival. ‘We are seeking to extend the tourist season in Orkney – that’s
why we are holding the festival in September.’ And that’s why the festival
has been sponsored by the travel companies that ply to and from Orkney,
as well as by the Orkney Islands Council, finding a worthy cause for some
of its oil revenues.

Howie – as everyone in Orkney knows him – is a legend in the islands,
and an inveterate organiser. He set up Radio Orkney, and ran it for a while
more or less on his own. He was also the driving force behind the first
Edinburgh Science Festival, in 1989. That science festival is now an established
annual event, and growing by the year, while Howie has returned to his native
Orkney to set up the science festival there.

‘We are not in competition with Edinburgh,’ he says. ‘The Orkney Science
Festival gets things done on a rather nice, small, scale – for example,
a walk around the shore with 20 to 40 people.’ He draws a parallel with
the St Magnus music festival, held annually in June. ‘The St Magnus Festival
is complementary to the Edinburgh Festival: they pick and choose just a
select few world figures – such as Vladimir Ashkenazy and Julian Bream.’
This year’s Orkney Science Festival, with a theme of astronomy and space,
brought in scientists from Denmark as well as national figures – such as
Heinz Wolff from Brunel University.

‘Orkney has a strong tradition of science, for its size,’ Howie carries
on. Among past Orcadian scientists was the eighth editor of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Thomas Traill, who amassed a collection of fossils that passed
to the great French scientist Louis Agassiz. Howie Firth believes that the
long winter nights in Orkney led people to sit down and ponder on the most
fundamental questions. He plans a workshop each year on the difficult interdisciplinary
areas of science: this year, it was science and the conscious mind.

Away from such deep stuff, residents and visitors alike stepped off
the grey stone streets of Kirkwall and into the Discovery Dome, into an
exhibition on James Logie Baird, into a portable inflatable planetarium
and into the theatre for a recording of the radio science quiz, The Litmus
Test. During the week some 3000 people passed through the planetarium, a
fair indication of how many took part in the festival. Not bad for a population
of 21 000 (especially when you consider that the recent meeting of the Australia
and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science drew only 500).

For people who could not come to the science, the science came to the
people. During the week, the portable planetarium and some of the lecturers
shuttled back and forth to seven of the other islands – along with the one-man-band
of Mr Boom, who entertained schoolchildren and adults alike with his own
brand of sing-along songs about science.

And Howie was right about extending the tourist season: Orkney was warm
and sunny that week, even as London succumbed to the first autumnal storms.
He was also right about the interest that science would instil in the Orcadians:
as our taxi driver enthused over the Festival, her navigation began to go
awry, and we inadvertently ended up not at the airport terminal, but outside
the gates of the Highland Park distillery.