Archive: Opinions

I've always been a science fan.  Last night I spent a half hour watching a video of International Space Station (ISS) Commander Sunita Williams giving a joyous a tour of the orbiting laboratory .  She was so obviously delighted to be there, and even though she was at the end of her tour in space she obviously loved floating from module to module.  She took impish delight in showing how the zero gravity toilet works, and was awed at the view of Earth and the docked Soyuz space capsule that was going to bring her home the next day.

I felt a bit of that joy last Saturday at a press conference celebrating The Sciencenter's 30th birthday.  The place was loaded with kids screaming with delight as they explored the exhibits, most of which are hands-on, and learned something about science without the usual pain of learning.  Williams getting to command the space station is the kind of payoff a science museum dreams of.

Two of my favorite moments were watching Executive Director Charlie Trautmann playing with the exhibits.  Running a science museum is serious work, but that doesn't mean it can't be a blast.   he interrupted our tour to show us how a few of them worked, obviously getting caught up in the wonders of science.  He loved playing with the nano particles, and he really, really loved the infrared camera exhibit, rubbing ice on himself to show how the cold areas show up as dark spots.


It put me in mind of 'Science Explorers' when I was in middle school (we called it junior high school).  Every other Saturday my friend Benji and I would take the trolley to the Boston Science Museum.  The lecture series was in a very cool room with screens and blackboards that went up and down and hooked up to video cameras (OK, not as cool today, but in the 1960s this was high tech!)  They geared the lectures to what middle-schoolers would thing was cool.

I particularly remember three experiences.  In the first, they lined up a bunch of pingpong balls on sticks across a long lab table on the podium.  From our viewpoint it was just a line of balls.  But when they pointed a video camera from the side of the room we saw the 'Big Dipper' on the screen, which taught us something about the challenges of astrogation.

The second was just cool for adolescent boys.  They told us the difference between explosions and implosions.  Then they put a giant TV tube into a cage and hit it with a big hammer, making it implode into the tube's vacuum.  I still love when they blow up things on Mythbusters.

The Boston museum owns the world's largest Van de Graaff electrostatic generator.  In those days they had it housed in an upside down water tower in the museum's parking lot, so it wasn't available for the general public.  We felt special as we filed into a wire cage that would protect us from being electrocuted.  They had a Conveyor belt that circled the generator, with various things on it like miniature trees and a house.  How could we not love giant lightning bolts hitting that stuff?  And you could feel your hair raising in the charged air.  Wow!

So I guess you don't have to be a kid to love the Sciencenter.  I felt every bit of the same joy I remember as a Science Explorer Saturday.  I'll bet Williams loved her local science museum when she was a kid.  As it happens she went to high school in the town neighboring the one where I grew up, so I bet she saw some of the same exhibits that excited me in Boston.  Today she holds the records for being the woman who has spent the longest time in space, and most space walks for a woman.  Maybe it rubbed off on me, too -- sometimes I'm a little spacey...

Science doesn't have to be dry and indecipherable.  The joy of exploring our world and the universe is infectious when the right people are infecting you.  Luckily for us, you don't have to go all the way to the space station to feel that.  We have the Sciencenter right here.

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