A science museum is a kind of experiment. It demands the most elaborate equipment: Imax theaters, Administration."">NASA space vehicles, collections of living
creatures, digital planetarium projectors, fossilized bones. Into this
mix are thrust tens of thousands of living human beings: children on
holiday, weary or eager parents, devoted teachers, passionate
aficionados and casual passers-by. And the experimenters watch, test,
change, hoping. ...
LAB PLAY Bubbles at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Hoping for what? What are the goals of these experiments, and when do they succeed? Whenever I’m near one of these museological
laboratories, I eagerly submit to their probes, trying to find out. The
results can be discouraging since some experiments seem so purposeless;
their only goal might be to see if subjects can be persuaded to return
for future amusement.
Many science museums, for example, now feature prepackaged touring shows about hit movies to draw in the
crowds. (I saw costumes from the “Chronicles of Narnia” films and the
stage sets from “Star Trek” films on two separate visits to the
Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.) Otherwise sober institutions
present filmic extravaganzas with only the flimsiest relationship to
science (an upbeat promotional travelogue about Saudi Arabia is now
getting the Imax treatment at Boston’s Museum of Science).
But there are also serious inquiries going on in science museums,
philosophical goals described in mission papers, conflicting theories
about what should happen when visitors arrive. And differences in
approaches are astonishing. I have seen meticulous displays explicating
the structure of padlocks (London’s Science Museum), a hortatory
exhibition of environmental apocalypse (New York’s American
Museum of Natural History), a terrarium of dung beetles plowing
through waste (New Orleans’s Audubon Insectarium), an array of physics
demonstrations in which visitors play with sand, balls, pendulums and
bubbles (San Francisco’s Exploratorium), collections of antique bicycles
and movie cameras (Berlin’s and Prague’s science museums), and a
50-year-old exhibition in which mathematical principles are portrayed as
beautifully as the topological surfaces on display (Boston’s Museum of
Science).
This antic miscellany is dizzying. But there are lineaments of sustained conflict in the apparent chaos. Over the last
two generations, the science museum has become a place where politics,
history and sociology often crowd out physics and the hard sciences.
There are museums that believe their mission is to inspire political
action, and others that seek to inspire nascent scientists; there are
even fundamental disagreements on how humanity itself is to be regarded.
The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum’s struggle to
define itself.
A century ago, such a notion would have been ridiculous. Museums were simply collections of objects. And science
museums were collections of objects related to scientific inquiry and
natural exploration. Their collections grew out of the “wonder
cabinets” of gentlemen explorers, conglomerations of the marvelous.
Museums ordered their objects to reflect a larger natural order. In
1853, when a new natural history museum at Oxford University was
being proposed, one advocate suggested that each specimen should have
“precisely the same relative place that it did in God’s own Museum, the
Physical Universe in which it lived and moved and had its being.” The
science museum was meant to impress the visitor with the intricate order
of the universe, the abilities of science to discern that order, and
the powers of a culture able to present it all in so imposing a secular
temple.
Not all of this was disinterested. Natural history museums typically treated non-Western cultures as if they were
subsidiary branches in an evolutionary narrative; deemed closer to
nature, these cultures were treated as part of natural history rather
than as part of history. Self-aggrandizing posing was generally mixed
in with the museum project.
But you can still feel its energy. Go to any science museum with an extensive collection and walk among its
oldest display cases. The London Science Museum, for example, which had
its origins in the Crystal Palace of the Great Exposition of 1851, has
collections that still invoke the churning energies of the Industrial
Revolution and its transformations.
One of the most astonishing collections I have seen is the Wellcome Collection, also in London. It
includes moccasins owned by Florence Nightingale, Napoleon’s toothbrush,
amputation saws, an array of prosthetic limbs, a Portuguese
executioner’s mask, Etruscan votive offerings and obstetrical forceps.
Henry Wellcome, who had made his fortune with the invention of the
medicinal pill, owned over a million objects by the mid-1930s and
imagined them fitting into a great “Museum of Man” that would
encyclopedically trace humanity’s concerns with the body. After his
death, the collection was partly dispersed, but even what is left is as
exhilarating as it is bewildering. You look at such collections and
sense an enormous exploratory enterprise. You end up with an enlarged
understanding of the world’s variety and an equally enlarged sense of
the human capacity to make sense of it.
But that ambition is gone and so is the trust in ourselves. This may be the crux of the
uncertainty in contemporary science museums. Where does the museum place
us, its human creators? Consider two great American planetariums that
have been renovated and reconfigured in the last 10 years: the Griffith
Observatory in Los Angeles and the Rose Center
for Earth and Space in New York.
A version of this article appeared in print on March 18, 2010, on
page F1 of the New York edition.
