Suresh Menon: The science of panic

Have you ever wondered how some phrases that once caused you to break into a cold sweat no longer mean anything? Two words that most often caused perspiration and discomfort were ‘science project'. This was always uttered by my son around midnight after another busy day improving the world.

"HEY MUM, DAD," he would yell, rushing into the bedroom speaking in capital letters, "Tomorrow is the science fair in school and I need to have a science project ready." This, as experienced parents will tell you, is not the time to break into a moral lecture on timing, procrastination, preparation and letting sleeping parents lie. It's the time for action.

You run from room to room searching for anything in the house that could convert itself into a science project - coat hangers, torches, blue liquids in odd-shaped bottles, battery cells that expired long ago mourned by all - anything. Meanwhile you start working on themes.

"Why don't you carry a small rock, stand on a chair and drop it from time to time for a project named: ‘Gravity is all around us'?" you ask and are given one of those looks sons reserve for fathers they think are about to go over the edge. "Or better still, why don't you do what I did when I was in school - take some rubber balls, ink portions of them to demonstrate the different phases of the moon?"

What I don't tell him is how the exhibit was so popular that the other boys picked up the balls and started a game, throwing them at one another to demonstrate that round objects can fly around the room when chucked with great force even if portions of them are covered in black ink.

For the first time in decades you hope a case of measles or chicken pox panics the school authorities and forces them to shut down for a while.

Mothers are a great help too. They tell their sons to stretch a balloon across the mouth of a tumbler and beat it with a pencil. "What does that prove?" asks the son, to be given the immortal answer: "that is your project - to get the others to guess what your project is."

I can't remember how these things played out. But they must have ended well, because my son finished school and stayed away from science for the rest of his life. Sometimes good things come from science projects - some of our top lawyers and artists once ran around in the middle of the night looking for projects, an activity that encouraged them to wisely explore other fields.