The Science Viking is committed to providing high quality Historical Interpretation services, with a focus on showing how Science can be used to explain History.
In real life the Science Viking is an ex-science teacher who lives in the Lake District with one wife, two guinea pigs, three cats, four dogs, and five kids. He has been a Viking re-enactor for over thirty years and has, due to his love of history, picked up quite a bit of information about Vikings and many other things, even though he only has a CSE grade 2 in history from school.
With about 30 years experience in public speaking and nearly 10 years as a fully qualified teacher you can be sure that you are in good hands when you book the Science Viking. Every aspect of his work is rigorously researched, and his displays are constantly updated as new information becomes available.
The Arts and Science
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty.”
Above is a small part of my favourite ever quote. You can read the whole thing here, it’s beautiful, and is what got The Science Viking started as a concept.
It’s only relatively recently, historically speaking, that the Arts and Sciences have been considered separate entities. Modern schooling tends, today, to treat each subject separately, and never the twain shall meet. Historically, many artists were also scientists, taking Leonardo da Vinci as an example. William Harvey, the discoverer of the human circulatory system, was an accomplished artist himself, as evidenced by his fine, detailed, drawings. Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, creator of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the early 8th century, had to make his own ink and pigments out of local materials. Today he would, in his way, be considered an accomplished chemist as well as an artist and scribe.
When you look, throughout history, and even today, the Arts, Humanities and Sciences have always impacted on each other.
This means that, even though all of our workshops and displays are historical, you can expect to learn a lot about science when you book us.