A few months ago, on a brief trip to Boston, I spent an afternoon at an old favorite, the Science Museum. In the past, I had enjoyed it in the company of children; now, at a slower pace, I had a chance to realize that it was truly a pioneer of its kind.
These days, lots of museums have ‘Science’ in their titles, and new ones keep popping up. While their roots go back further, nearly all took on the true concept of a broad-range science museum just before or after World War II. The Boston Science Museum made that leap in 1939.
Most of the ‘dusty old case’ exhibits are long gone, but this little room off to one side gives a taste of evolving concepts and materials. There’s also an interesting exhibit on the museum’s own history.
The oldest form of the idea grew out of study collections of specimens used for university courses or research or from the private ‘cabinets of curiosities’ assembled by wealthy collectors. By the 18th century, some had evolved into natural history museums. In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution called forth exhibits of mechanical wonders and inventions: museums of technology.
If you doubt that headline above, just scroll this page up and down and watch the black-and-white circles start to spin and change shape. And, oh yes, they are circles. Perfect circles. Seeing is Deceiving! The Impossible Triangle, viewed straight on, appears to be one color and flat.
By late in that century and early in the next, the two concepts began to grow together, and to introduce the idea of not just looking at objects, but interacting with them. A museum in Munich created moving exhibits, with levers and buttons for visitors to push. A wealthy Chicago visitor took that as the inspiration to create Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry in the late 1930s.
Engaging with visitors is a theme here. Exhibits feature local science work, an area for public discussion of scientific and ethical issues, and a chance to compare what you eat with the diets of others around the world.
And just about that time, in Boston, Brad Washburn became director of what had been the New England Museum of Natural History under various names and in various buildings since 1830. Under Washburn’s leadership, the museum took on its present name, built a new museum spanning the Charles River on top of a dam, and began unifying its exhibits and the new concept of a museum of all kinds of science. It also became a mentor to other museums.
The Theater of Electricity is one of the most popular exhibit areas, with many demonstrations, including indoor lightning produced by the Van de Graaff domes that began their life as MIT’s first atom splitter in the early 1930s.
The giant lightbulb, almost two feet high and weighing 35 pounds, is the biggest commercial lightbulb ever made. It was equal to 500 100w bulbs and was used for large spaces like airports and theaters.
These days, the Museum of Science has over 700 interactive exhibits, a planetarium, an indoor zoo, a butterfly and insect garden, and a domed IMAX theatre. Things are a bit quiet now because of the pandemic, but in happier times it also features a wide variety of live exhibitions, including indoor lightning generated by its giant Van de Graaf domes.
In Mathematica, the emphasis is on how math helps us ‘see’ and understand physical relationships through models and activity. Here, a Möbius strip shows a 3-D figure with only one edge and one surface.
At right, marbles drop through a series of obstacles to pile up at the bottom; the red line shows the curve of probability they take on as they fall with more at the center and fewer at the edges.
To make room for all those exhibits, the Museum has seemed to be almost always adding new spaces and new galleries, and providing more space for existing ones—as well as for hosting crowd-attracting exhibits such as the current one featuring “The Science Behind Pixar,” using favorite animation characters.
The Pixar characters have also invaded the Museum’s space exploration area, giving us a One-Clue Mystery for the week, which was solved by George G, who recognized Buzz Lightyear hanging out in the Apollo command module.
Of course, new is not all there is; with a bit of humor and a lot of science, there is a dinosaur area; T-Rex has a little sign noting that even though his tiny arms can’t reach his face, he still needs to wash his hands regularly.
And the museum has a little fun with that in other ways; in keeping with its ‘everything is science’ motif, even the restroom fixtures become a teaching opportunity—and a moment for a joke.
There’s a large indoor playground area for younger kids, but like everything else, it’s also a teaching tool, with labels explaining how the different climbing, balancing and moving structures work, and what they do for you. And, since it was near Christmas when I visited, of course a snow-covered model train set.
Among my favorites in every museum I’ve found them, are old-fashioned historic dioramas. The upper one comes with an explanation of how important timbering was in early New England, and how the trade came to an end as old-growth timber ran out. Some of that timber went to shipyards such as the Boston one modeled here, showing it as it was in the 1850s.
There are also some ‘animal habitat’ dioramas, but unlike the old ones I remember that just showed animals and their homes, these are paired with exhibits about how the animals live and work, and how their body parts serve the same purposes as some of our tools do.
The Hall of Human Life has a number of interactive workstations like the one above, allowing visitors to explore different aspects of how the environment changes us. Other stations include social environment, food environment and time environment.
Among the Museum’s newer features are a high-ceilinged central lobby/gallery featuring a green wall, views up the Charles River and a subtle sculpture that I didn’t notice at first. It’s the mesh in the middle of the upper picture, and through a complicated mechanism, it moves in multiple directions, mirroring the motion of wind and water out on the river.
Even with no crowds and a whole afternoon, there’s so much to see and do that another visit is needed, hopefully in happier times.
