England-2011-cambridge

Cambridge Excursion, Saturday 15 January 2011

Travel

You will need to be at King's Cross station at the Information booth by the big trainboard by 08:45 at the latest. The train leaves at 09:15 from King's Cross, arriving at Cambridge at 10:02. We'll return on the 20:15 from Cambridge, arriving at 21:04 at King's Cross station. You will need to be at the Cambridge station by 19:45 at the latest.

Preparation

• Before Saturday morning you should read/skim the Wikipedia page about Cambridge (see below) to learn about the history of Cambridge and a bit about what's there.
• Look through the list of museums (see below) and think about which ones you might want to visit.

Plan

When we get to Cambridge we'll split-up into groups based on which museums/sites/etc we plan on visiting. Lunch will be on your own and then we'll meet for dinner around 17:30. That should give us enough time to eat and make it back to the train station for our 20:15 ride back to London.

Bloggers

We will need two volunteers from the studio audience to take pictures and write-up/post a blog entry about this excursion. Get in touch if you are interested.

Science, Technology and Society

There are many connections to the course in Cambridge, here is a sampling of them:

• Francis Bacon - scientific method
• Issac Newton - calculus, gravity
• Cavendish Laboratory - hydrogen, density of the earth
• Charles Darwin - evolution through natural selection
• Alan Touring - basic model of computation
• Francis Crick and James Watson - structure of DNA

Since it's so early in the semester we haven't read or discussed any of these yet. Given that I'd like you ... museums,

About Cambridge

Cambridge is a relatively small, university town about 50 miles Northeast of London. It is distinguished by the many universities and colleges located there and their museums, architecture, people, etc. There are also a couple of very nice markets in-town.