Editorial

Mercury, March/April 1997 Table of Contents

(c) 1997 Astronomical Society of the Pacific

As an undergraduate in 1986, I visited the San Francisco Exploratorium for the first time. It had been a tough semester, and I was beginning to question whether science was for me. I spent two days playing with the lasers and lenses and levers, and they reminded me there was meaning to the equations and exams.

The Exploratorium's techniques have been adopted by museums and schools around the world. The hands-on activities surely encourage many young people to become, or remain, scientists. But what about everybody else? Do they go home knowing how scientific reasoning can inform their lives? Do they realize how all that playful experimentation relates to the science they see on the evening news?

Even on my initial romp through the Exploratorium, I remember doing each exhibit, saying "Wow, that's cool," and then moving on to the next exhibit on a wholly unrelated subject. When I returned to the friends I was staying with, I could hardly recall individual exhibits. All I could say is that they were fun. Is that enough?

The limitations of the Exploratorium become apparent to me this past January when I visited its sister institution, the Ontario Science Center in Toronto. You don't hear much about the Ontario center south of the border. Unlike the Exploratorium, it hardly ever gets cited in magazine articles. Yet science-museum experts give the two centers, which both opened in 1969, equal credit for ushering in the era of hands-on exhibits. Over the past decade, the Ontario center has been pioneering a new era of interactive science.

Both institutions put the visitor to work. At each exhibit, you sit down, do an experiment, see a scientific principle in action, and, hopefully, ask your own questions and reach your own answers. Plenty of phenomena can be illustrated in a single exhibit: color mixing, electromagnetic induction, double-pendulum chaos. But what about more involved topics? No single exhibit could let visitors explore, say, the mind. It takes a series of exhibits that build on one another. And this is where the Exploratorium fails.

It is a noisy, disheveled laboratory with exhibits in only the vaguest of patterns. An exhibit on the human perception of hot and cold is next to a build-it-yourself archway. After a couple of hours I find myself glazed-over by the visual and aural chaos.

On a visit this year, I stumbled across an exhibit that seemed to have something to do with tornadoes. Condensate rose from a grille in the floor and a fan at top was trying to spin it into a vortex ­ or at least that's what visitors gathered around the exhibit were insisting, in the absence of any printed explanation. Kids, seeing a large platform, climbed up and played amid the mist, further clouding (or, rather, un-clouding) the effect. The visitors drifted away to the bubble-makers and cafeteria, between which this failed tornado was inexplicably placed.

Science itself is chaotic, and the Exploratorium certainly captures that, as was the intention of its much-cited founder, Frank Oppenheimer. If connections among the phenomena are there, Oppenheimer reasoned, visitors can find them. Yet they are expected to do so without benefit of the motivations and mechanisms that scientists have: the review papers, the invited talks, the discussions over coffee and doughnuts, the time to sit and think. Most visitors probably don't even realize that connections are there to be made. The main goal of most kids is simply to turn as many cranks as they can in the time their parents have given them.

A new series of exhibitions at the Exploratorium, designed to parallel California schools' New Science, does draw analogies among disciplines: for example, cycles in biology, cycles in geology, cycles in physics. But even these don't have much to say about the deeper connections among the sciences or with the rest of society.

These are issues that clearly have preoccupied the Ontario center. It has been producing innovative, controversial, self-reflective exhibitions on such subjects as cognition, racism, and world hunger ­ exhibitions that go beyond gee-whiz.

An exhibit on the cultural bias of IQ tests asks whether you know the vocabulary of rap music; one on the reliability of memory shows you a brief video of a crime and then asks you to identify the culprit; another tells you to step only on the black squares of a checkerboard pattern, and afterwards asks you why you followed the instructions ­ a segue into the Stanford prisoner experiment. You could, and I did, spend hours discussing and debating those exhibits with fellow museum-goers. If that isn't participatory science education, what is?

Each of these exhibitions is a sustained exploration of its topic; the little pieces, together, become more than the sum of their parts. Their layout ensured that, despite the crowds, the center never seemed crowded. I could actually concentrate.

The Ontario center is not the only one that challenges visitors to manipulate ideas as well as dials. But many museums are heading the other way, away from any whiff of controversy. We need the Exploratorium to rejoin the revolution it helped to start.

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