SPEEDY SCIENCE

As a treat, Sammy pulled out a bag of Starburst from her shopping, and beamed at me.

“Science experiment!” she said, happily. After she had miraculously found a bag of Opal Fruits the other day, I knew where she was going, and I was all in.

I was super-excited. My head set to designing all manner of controlled experiments with blindfolds and palate cleansers, with rulers, and the kitchen scales, and of course a series of taste-tests to ascertain our various hypotheses about Opal Fruits versus Starbursts. It was exhilarating.

“I’ll document it!” I said, grabbing my phone for photographs and my notebook for data. Everything needed to be meticulously done, carefully prepared so that there was as little room for bias as possible. I would, I thought, line up similar colours - red, green, orange from both bags and start with a visual test. Then, with postulates forming about the smell, size and flavour of each colour compared to its counterpart, I’d design some way of working out whether Opal Fruits were indeed sweeter, juicier, more flavoursome than their watered-down descendants.

I looked around, suddenly snapping out of my daydream.

“Yeah,” she said, munching, “Definitely prefer Opal Fruits. They’re um…” a hand rustled into the bag, “Just nicer.”

It was then that I concluded that Sammy and I have very different approaches to science. She had come up with a hypothesis (Opal Fruits are better), an experiment (actually just eating sweets), her own data (taste), and a conclusion (Opal Fruits are better) in the time it had taken her to unwrap a Starburst and pop it in. That’s some speedy science - empirical, uncontrolled, based on personal observation, and entirely unrepeatable or subject to peer review, but speedy science nonetheless.

I smiled and put down my notebook.

I think what I should do is sneakily take a selection of both types of sweet and then give them to her when she’s not expecting it. During the washing up, maybe while driving. In fact, if I hold out a Starburst and tell her it’s an Opal Fruit, I wonder whether she’d know… Perhaps two can play at speedy science? I'll keep you posted.