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At the Exploratorium and the Tech Museum, 2 Views of Science
SAN FRANCISCO — It is a hot day at the Palace of Fine Arts, but no one is bending down to take a promised drink. The spout, gleaming with polished chrome, looks like those on many new water fountains. The problem is that it is mounted on the rim of an open toilet.
“A Sip of Conflict” reads the explanatory sign, for this is an exhibit at the Exploratorium, the astonishing science museum here. Judging from the grimaces and giggles of visitors, the point being made is clear. We may know something to be true — that the water is clean and cold — but sensory experience conflicts with reason. In this conflict, guess which wins?
Compare that exhibit with another, at the Tech Museum of Innovation in nearby San Jose. You sit at a computer monitor and select elements of a roller coaster ride — track length, loop shapes, cart speeds — constructing a rudimentary track. Then you walk over to a roller coaster cart, where your custom bit of track is simulated: a screen shows the cart’s motion over the track, while the cart rocks and thrusts as if it were really moving through your self-constructed ride.
Could the approaches be more different? The Exploratorium exhibit has almost nothing to do with technology; the Tech exhibit celebrates it. The Exploratorium exhibit is almost deliberately old-fashioned; the Tech exhibit aspires to state-of-the-art effects. The Exploratorium display is modest, and succeeds; the Tech’s is ambitious and seems less spectacular than its promise.
The exhibits even reflect two different archetypes for the modern science museum. While the Exploratorium focuses on experiment, the Tech focuses on sensation. The Exploratorium has the aura of a science fair, the Tech the aura of a sci-fi fair.
But both models are in transition and confronting challenges. The two museums also have new directors. The Tech, facing declining attendance and recovering from Silicon Valley’s crash, hired a new president, Peter Friess, a German master clockmaker whose doctoral thesis connected the history of art and the history of technology. He also directed and helped to create the Deutsches Museum in Bonn, which focuses on German technology and research since 1945.
The Exploratorium has brought in Dennis M. Bartels as executive director. Experienced in science education and policy (and a former director of the Exploratorium’s learning center), he plans to expand the museum’s programming and subject matter while overseeing its move to a new building during the next few years, doubling its size. The new site, according to current plans, is on two piers near the downtown area.
Admittedly this is not a comparison of equals. The Exploratorium, founded in 1969 by the physicist Frank Oppenheimer (J. Robert’s brother), created the participatory model for the modern science museum. The best of its 400-some displays strip away irrelevant detail and decorous flimflam and focus on simple, pungent principles. Displays about mechanics, sound, electricity and human perception inspire a combination of wonder and unsettled thought: something is palpably felt that had earlier been just an abstract idea.
The Exploratorium’s displays are meant to appear homemade, and they are: the workshop where they are constructed and the display areas share the museum’s floor space. It really is an educational institution, with substantial resources devoted to training teachers and scrutinizing the effects of its exhibits.
But the Exploratorium’s style has also become so familiar that its displays can seem a bit shopworn, like well-used equipment in an aging high school science lab. The contemporary scientific universe is also different from what it was in the 1970’s, the Exploratorium’s first heady decade.
What about the personal computer, advances in medicine, nanotechnology, string theory, the Internet? None get satisfactory treatment here. Mr. Bartels, in an interview, pointed out that contemporary science had moved to extremes of scale: the very big and very small, the very fast and very slow. How, he asks, are they to be demonstrated with Exploratorium-style apparatus? And what about contemporary audiences’ taste for spectacle?
One response to these issues has been made by the Tech Museum, which was meant to embody the energy and inventiveness of Silicon Valley. It contains its own IMAX theater and, with its glossier aesthetic, celebrates newer technologies.
The museum, which opened in 1998 courtesy of the local government and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and companies, is housed in a $113 million building. Its 132,000 square feet now contain exhibits about the Internet, undersea exploration, earthquakes, genetic research and chip design, along with interactive displays and simulations.
Yet even with this kind of backing and ambition, the Tech pales in comparison with the Exploratorium. The tech crash couldn’t have helped. During the Tech’s first full year, 1999, the museum had 800,000 visitors. Last year there were fewer than 400,000, of which a third came only to see an IMAX film. (Some 500,000 visited the Exploratorium last year.)
But the Tech’s decline in attendance is not just a function of the local economy. During a recent weekend the largest crowds were waiting to see “Superman Returns” at the IMAX. Some exhibits were in disrepair. And displays that were meant to tap into Silicon Valley’s technological strengths seemed less sophisticated than commercial products and computer programs in daily use.
One participatory exhibit had all of the stolidity of the Exploratorium toilet but none of the wit: the visitor is invited to “experience an M.R.I.,” which involves lying down on a tabletop with your head in a plastic module as a tape recording plays the medical equipment’s grating, pulsing noise.
Mr. Friess, in an interview, said the museum would have to define itself more clearly by celebrating the spirit of innovation, and connecting itself more closely with the stories and ideas of Silicon Valley. But it is apparent that a reimagining will also be needed.
Is it possible that each of these museums could get hints of what it needs from what the other features? One thing missing from the Exploratorium, for example, is the very notion of innovation that Mr. Friess emphasizes. The Exploratorium presents ideas and principles but not scientists or methods. It is ahistorical. One wanders from one display or discipline to another, from earth sciences to mechanics, to optics, to psychology; each exhibit is effectively an experiment.
But many of these experiments have historical analogs: they were designed to answer particular questions. Visitors get no sense of this. They race objects of different shapes down ramps or change the lengths of swinging pendulums, for example, without recognizing that they are conducting variations of classic experiments Newton used to discern the laws of motion.
A historical context would also raise other questions: Which experiments failed and why? How were certain scientific questions answered or ignored?
Such an approach might expand the Exploratorium’s breadth and suggest different kinds of exhibits. It might even make it easier to explore the newer branches of science or examine ethical issues that Mr. Bartels said he wished to address more intensively.
As for what the Tech might gain from looking more closely at the Exploratorium, the benefits would be legion. The Tech’s displays put glitter ahead of substance. One offers protruding bronze molds of explorers’ hands and asks visitors to “touch hands that touched discovery,” including the hand of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of “Star Trek,’’ treating him as if he were as real as an adjacent oceanographer. It’s a silly exhibit with an even sillier execution.
Another simulates an earthquake, though its shaking floor and sharp jerks seem more like an amusement park ride that can’t get off the ground.
In most exhibits little is learned about either science or innovation. But consider what happens at the Exploratorium, where simpler technologies are involved, and abstract ideas are made palpable.
Cold air is heavier than warm air? Sure, but wait until you’ve blown soap bubbles that hover without sinking, buoyed on the chilled air created by a slab of dry ice. Faster moving air creates the “lift” for airplanes? Sure, but make a flat disk float without falling as a jet of air blows down on it, and the principle begins to amaze.
At the Exploratorium square wheels roll smoothly over a properly shaped surface; the blood vessels in your own eyes can be seen; ice crystals branch out over a glass surface; the corpses of an iguana and mouse are devoured by natural scavengers.
In each display that works (not all of them do) something simple is indelibly portrayed. We may think we know the world’s scientific principles, but perhaps we haven’t yet come to feel those truths or to fully believe them. The best exhibit, like an experiment, has enough power to prove its point and reshape experience.
The Exploratorium even provides another water fountain for those who blanch at the toilet’s testimony to the inadequacy of reason. Press the fountain’s copper-plated switch, lean over, and the moment your lips touch the liquid, music is heard: water completes the electrical circuit.
The sip offers not conflict but wonder. We thought we knew the world, but here, drinking deeply, we find we are only beginning to understand it.
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