I got personally the idea that hands-on was important from studying Sidney Bradford, the blind man, because we had found that by actually handling things, literally with his fingers, that that information from touching objects was absolutely vital for seeing and when you come to think of it, it’s logically necessary. I mean you see things as hard, for example, or hot, or cold, like an ice cream, but, of course, the image in the eye is not hard or hot or cold, of course it isn’t. So you’ve got to learn to associate the purely optical information in the eye with non-optical characteristics of objects like a knife is sharp, for example, and can jolly well cut you. That you discover by experiment, often a hurtful one. I mean kids hurt themselves, you know, because objects are dangerous as well as useful whereas the image in the eye is nothing. It’s just a shadow basically so you’ve got to sort of enrich the shadows in the eye by knowledge of the properties of objects in order to see that objects can be used, can be threatening, can be rewarding, from images, this is the point and of course artists cash in on this with pictures. Interesting, we could perhaps talk about that in a minute. Well, anyway, what I wanted to do in the Science Centre was to extend the experience of SB, the blind man, to normal children and through adult life that you learn to see and understand and seeing and understanding are completely linked by active exploration, doing things. That was the philosophy behind it.
And how did that relate to Bacon?
Well, Bacon, I don’t think had all that really. I mean in his island, his concern and I’m sure you know more about this than I do, I think that he was concerned to show the public the potentialities of what we now call science and technology. I don’t think either word was available at that time actually but what we now call science and technology, and then he had what he called his lamp, so the thinkers. He had about ten lamps with brilliant ideas and then he had lesser luminaries actually trying out experiments and he said that anybody could be useful in what he called, what we later called science for gaining knowledge and relating it and so on, that could be done by ordinary mortals with a few really brilliant lamps and so on. So he really invented the research laboratory and also invented exploratory because the idea was the public would be involved and I think Bacon’s dream is absolutely wonderful, absolutely wonderful, and it’s just sad that it didn’t get carried out 300 years earlier, you know, than it did.
Why won’t pushing buttons do?
No, I don’t think pushing buttons do at all, I really don’t, and I don’t think video does. I mean video is fine or pushing buttons when you know what it’s all about but the stages of gaining information to perceive visually or by hearing through exploring actual world of objects and their properties is, to me, the crucial point and I think of the child really as a sort of a scientist who bumbles about, does all sorts of things rather randomly, notes connections between things and above all notes connections between the physical properties of things and the patterns of shadows, if you like, inside their eyes. The shadows become real to the brain through knowledge with objects which is obtained by active discovery through touch.
