Cosmic rays! Cow eyes! Oh my!
Last Saturday, while one member of the family was getting a dose
of uplifting culture, my nephew and I went to pull on levers and
turn cranks.
We went to San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a unique hybrid that
combines a museum with a funhouse arcade.
Cosmic rays! Cow eyes! Oh my!
Last Saturday, while one member of the family was getting a dose of uplifting culture, my nephew and I went to pull on levers and turn cranks.
We went to San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a unique hybrid that combines a museum with a funhouse arcade.
There’s precious little in the Exploratorium that’s got to do with nature or biology. When we dropped by, visitors were invited to bear witness to the dissection of a cow’s eye (no longer attached to the cow, of course) and a flower.
Most of the Marina District museum is devoted to furthering our understanding of how the world around us works and how the machines we populate the planet with do what they do.
An enormous robot clacked away near a personal computer programmed to “learn” from comments and questions typed into it by visitors. Perhaps due to visitors’ own shortcomings with written communications, the computer appeared to need a crash course in writing. Josh and I quickly agreed it was the dumbest computer we had ever encountered.
If one takes the time to pay attention, much of what the Exploratorium reveals is about ourselves. Try as I might, I could not induce Josh to take a sip from a drinking fountain spouting from a toilet, even though a sign assured visitors that the drinking water is the same as that coming from other fountains in the museum, and that the toilet had never been put to its originally intended use.
It seems that conditioning trumps logic.
We tested our reaction times, and how we respond to different colors. We made a variety of noises with improbable musical instruments, and examined waveforms on a variety of contraptions.
In short, we played.
After the visit, Josh said his favorite device might have been one that measures galvanic response. A volunteer places two fingers into trays, and a television tray records response to questions, operating under the theory that embarrassing questions give one sweaty palms. Sure enough, jokes sent the blip on the screen plummeting and questions about cute girls caused the trace to spike upward.
My favorite display was one of the few that doesn’t allow one to pull levers or spin nobs. Staring into a cloud chamber, small squiggles emerged, the tracks of cosmic rays that had passed through space, through the building and blundered into the chamber where their presence was revealed.
Growing up on a steady diet of science fiction, “cosmic rays” are hard to beat.
But my favorite part of the Exploratorium is an installation located a long walk from the museum itself. Staff members during the 1980s recycled stone from a dismantled cemetery into a wave organ. Granite and marble slabs are arranged into a series of seats at the end of the breakwater separating the Marina Green and harbor from the bay. Pipes lead into the bay, terminating in spouts emerging from the stone. When the tide is just right, the pipes moan and gurgle as water pumps in and out of them.
It’s usually a quiet corner in a busy city, a perfect place to enjoy a sandwich and watch the boats come and go while the sea plays its eerie tune.
Ambling back from the wave organ, Josh plucked some wild fennel and sniffed at it. That provoked a discussion about how licorice is flavored and what, exactly, is the flavor in the red stuff people call licorice as well.
The museum certainly offered its lessons, but as we walked along that chilly afternoon, Josh’s innate curiosity revealed that learning is where you find it.
