By Sonya Fladun
DO you remember Professor Julius Sumner Miller? Think of “the glass and a half of full-cream milk” chocolate advert that used to be on TV.
He was a gruff scientist, but a gifted-if-eccentric communicator. He would do great experiments with kids on TV when I was a child – all sorts of stuff about gravity, air pressure, electricity and magnets.
I wasn’t really into the professor; I remember him as all crazy hair, thick glasses, huge bushy eyebrows and a voice that sounded like a cross between a “Dr Who” Dalek and a rotary hoe. 
My husband (a bit of a science nerd then and now) was a devout fan and it looks like it runs in the family. My five-year-old boy is science mad; experimenting is his number one favourite pastime. 
If he’s not exploding an egg in the microwave or mixing vinegar and bicarb of soda to get his model volcano to shoot lava all over the place, he’s trying to use his balloon pump to empty water out of the toilet – there are days when I think he is channelling the old professor (well, him and Dennis the Menace).
Sometimes, I seem to spend most of the day clearing up after one or another of his experiments. But I am getting smarter. These last holidays, I got him into a day of the Questacon Holiday Program and left the experimentation in the hands of the experts (okay, so I might have wanted to farm out the mess).
It was one of the best days of his young life. He learnt everything there was to know about the weather and came home with a collection of ingeniously hand-made devices to measure wind speed, direction and temperature.
He is really keen to go there next holidays but, apparently, due to budget cuts future holiday programs at Questacon have been cancelled. 
I know this is not the fault of the institution itself. When budgets contract, something has to be sacrificed, but didn’t I hear something about an educational revolution? Weren’t hundreds of millions going to be spent on getting each child to a computer? Well, shouldn’t we also be encouraging a love of science and give our children opportunities to experiment and see how the world works? 
And no, this does not stem from self-interest (well, okay, not entirely). But it’s really important to have people like Prof Sumner Miller out there; people who are interested in what the weather has in store, how computers actually work or maybe how robots could be used to clean the bathroom or – even – what goes into making things such as chocolate… so, really I’m thinking of us all.