A train to omniscience. Board the Science Express, currently docked at Cantonment Railway Station, and by the time you disembark, you would be endowed with knowledge that would have called for tomes.
From Nano technology to supercomputers to the origins of life to the cognitive fount head in the brain to the global challenges that doom humankind, the train on a five-day stop has it all.
Did you know that while 7,000 languages are spoken across the world, only 100 are officially recognised languages and the rest are endangered facing the threat of near extinction? Were you aware that dicaffeoylquinic acid is being tested on rodents and could be the answer to cure AIDS?
The FOXp2 gene in every human being is the most problematic, it's associated with problem related to speech disorders. That an electronic car has been developed to avert accidents and keep to a speed limit. The car already on road in Germany has the capacity to control human senses. It comes fully equipped with an air brake system and a warning camera that can spot dangers ahead.
These are just a few of the tidbits that the 13-coach train is chock-full of. It also houses some rare exhibits such as the Mundrabilla meteorite that was discovered in 1911. Consisting of iron and nickel, this small piece had fallen off a larger 24-tonne meteorite that fell in Mundrabila in Australia. The gravitational wave detector, grounded in space, takes you into space and picks up any small gravitational difference in space.
Aimed at promoting pure science, the Science Express even takes you beyond the stratosphere. “The idea is to retain the interest of the young in pure science and orient them toward research in the same. The contents may be a little high end but it’s our way of making complicated things seem simple,” explains Dilip V Surkar, executive director of Vikram A Sarabhai Community Science Centre.
The train is an eight-month project that will run only till June this year. It began its journey on October 30, 2007 and will cover 15,000 km and spanning 57 cities before it gets back to Ahmedabad.
Science express is open to school and college students between 10 am and 5 pm till Monday.
Visitors make a beeline
The students and teachers were an excited lot. While the teachers thought it was apt for the high school students, the students said they were exposed to a whole new world, they’d never seen before.
Another visitor was a farmer who walked into the train and told one of the guides that he could barely read English and understand such high end images. He requested the young guide to explain the details to him. As the guide obliged, the farmer was all ears. No wonder, the farmer is bound to take whatever he has acquired on this train back to his village and home.
