Science Friction : Fleet Center Puts Fun Into Class to Help Sway Disenchanted Youths

“Hey, the shorter it is, the louder you hear it!”

Six-year-old Kevin Hawkins is clanging a dessert spoon against the table edge in a cramped little classroom behind the souvenir shop at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center. Kevin holds up the string the spoon is tied to and sticks it in his ear.

You can hear the metal ringing up the string.

This Saturday morning, there are a dozen spoons clanging against table legs, window sills and models of the planets.

“Now tell me,” Lisa Kleist, the only person in the room who is not 6, says loudly, “how do we hear things?”

“I know! I know!” calls Bryan Walsh. “My dad’s a doctor, and he tells me everything. It’s the eardrum. That’s a very, very thin piece of tissue and that leads to the cochlea. That’s like a little trumpet, and that sends messages to the brain.”

“Yeah,” Kevin says. “Sound goes through air, wood, water, carpet. I studied this last night ‘cause I knew I was coming.”

Ben Howard chimes in: “And . . . after it goes through the eardrum to the brain, it goes through a muscle with liquid in it.”

“Uh, OK. Let’s see how sound is made ,” Kleist says, trying to stay ahead of all this. “Let’s put our hands on our throats.”

Bryan sticks his hand in the air instead.

“I have a question and some stuff to tell you,” he says. “How come your throat doesn’t vibrate when you whistle?”

Kleist is fighting for survival here. She has a whirlwind on her hands. Like, these kids are . . . bright! Their parents are all psychologists or doctors or managers or scientists. They are all on the science center’s mailing list. They gladly pay $10 to get their kids a bit of Saturday morning science stimulation. Science! In the first grade, age 6.

We’re talking about the center’s pride, and its problem. Informal science education is the stated aim. Yet, the actual educating is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. Supporting this little program is the Reuben H. Fleet’s vast Disneyland of films and exhibits that beg you to fall in love with science and engineering.

Because right now at the center, there is a lot of soul-searching going on. This is its 15th birthday, after all, and they are duly taking stock of themselves.

Granted, they’ve grabbed the crowds by pioneering the Omnimax Space Theater with the tilted dome so you really felt part of it without wrecking your neck. They were the first in the world back in 1973.

Now, there are 53 just like them--an Omnimax film industry has spawned because of them. And they’ve made a mark setting up “informal science education”-- twiddles and tricks that show scientific principles and get played with because they’re fun. And they make a profit on this operation.

But now, they’re looking toward 2003--15 years away--and you can see the worries they have from the two birthday themes they’ve chosen: advocating science literacy and getting more minorities into science.

They don’t just want to be known as science’s Disneyland. They want to tackle the fight against science illiteracy, and especially the battle to bring minorities into science.

If you listen to Jeffrey Kirsch, the Fleet’s director, he’s got a crusade on his

hands: to make science accessible to the masses and attractive to the young.

“We’re in the age when schools have gone right back to the 3 R’s, and that doesn’t include science,” Kirsch said. “Science is hovering on the edges . . . interesting but not essential in our educational system. And the result you can see in everything from America’s space program to its universities.

“This country is in big trouble. Do you realize half the Ph.D.s graduating from U.S. universities are foreigners? And the main reason for that is we don’t have enough Americans coming through seeking science and engineering doctorates.”

The U.S. has suffered a shortage of scientists before. It was awakened from a torpor 30 years ago, when the Soviets suddenly put Sputnik into space. In that post-Sputnik fever, with John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s tripled between 1960 and 1970.

But when Apollo came to an end, and the post-Vietnam economy drooped, the numbers again slackened. Now, the numbers are just back up to 1970 levels. Except half are foreigners. Oh sure, companies tempt them to stay after graduation, but the general symptoms are clear.

“When you get an international science aptitude test among students in which U.S. students come in 13th, you’ve got a problem,” Kirsch said. “When you get science-teaching budgets constantly cut as second-rank subjects, when you read that Japanese Ph.D. candidates get three times more course work than our Ph.D.s, then you’ve got a problem.

“Then again, when you see that blacks comprise 10% of the labor force but only 2% (of) scientists and engineers (are black), when you see only eight doctorates in physical sciences and four in engineering among Mexican-Americans--when they’re 6.5% of the U.S. population--you’ve got problems. When are people going to realize science is important?”

(Those figures on doctorates are from a 1986 study from the Assn. of Science-Technology Centers and cover 1983.)

Real Eyes, Real Lungs

Which is why these children are in this mirrored room playing with string-and-can telephones, and listening to tuning forks. And why on other Saturdays, kids whose parents pay $10 get to cut up ox hearts to see how they work, get to dissect real eyes, squish their hands in real lungs so they understand how oxygen gets into the blood. They can work out the push and pull of magnets and where the North Pole is, make light bulbs light up and find out how to think Big’n’Bold like Archimedes, Franklin, Edison and Bell.

Here--in this little room with one-way mirrors so parents can see how their kids are doing without embarrassing them, science is getting a new lease on life.

“The important thing is to get them young before they have categorized science as dry and boring and for egg-head boys only,” said Fleet’s education chief Lynn Kennedy. “Best would be to get pregnant mothers and get them keen so they can start inspiring their kids right off at the top.”

Which sounds great. As does the Fleet philosophy: Suck them in with the cliche wonders of space and lasers, then try to hook them with more down-to-earth science for the messier, the more real, more interesting world of people. Biology, physics, math.

And yet the Bens and Bryans and and Kevins are the despair of Kirsch and Kennedy because they are the very kids who need this exposure the least. They’re the ones with the stimulating middle- and upper-class parents who already know what their kids need.

The minorities, the poorer kids, they never turn up at these Saturday classes. And that’s despite all sorts of outreach attempts.

“It’s not the kids, it’s the parents,” Kennedy said. “We’ve worked with United Way for space for minority kids. But even they can’t get through to motivate the parents.”

Kirsch said, “It’s an irony. Here in San Diego County we have more Nobel Laureates than even Los Angeles, six or seven, yet the mentality of the town and of its authorities is still Navy town. Laid-back, unintellectual beach town.

“Nobody (from local government) for instance has come to us once--even though we are one of the rare nonprofit public bodies that actually pays for itself--and said, ‘What can we do for you?’ Unlike so many other cities where institutions like us have set up.”

Back in class, the pupils have turned to tuning forks.

Fffiizzz!

“That’s radical!” Joshua Rosenbaum says as the tuning fork he bangs and dunks into the water sends the liquid into a spitting froth with its sound vibrations.

“You could use that as a weapon,” Bryan adds. “A giant-sounding fork and you bang it and you drop it into the sea next to the enemy ships.”

Kleist is trying to get water glasses to vibrate by rubbing them.

“The best thing is vinegar,” Kevin says to Kleist. “I know because I watched it on ‘Mr. Wizard.’ If you don’t get Nickelodeon, you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Kleist has blown up a balloon and wants Leon Greenblatt to pop it with a pin, to see whether air has weight.

“I think I’ve done this before,” Bryan says, blase.

“I know someone else who would much rather do this,” Leon says, flinching.

“Kill it!” a couple of more-enthusiastic girls yell.

Leon lets it go in a great backward swazzle. Three other balloons take off.

“All right,” Kleist says, ever unfazed, “we’re going to show how equal air pressures can make it impossible for you to blow this balloon up inside this bottle.”

“I know how to do this,” Bryan adds. “I love this. Can I tell you what’s going to happen? It’s impossible to blow up the balloon because there’s air inside the bottle. So what you have to do is put in a straw. I know. I saw it on ‘Mr. Wizard.’ On Nickelodeon.”

Kleist is beginning to manifest feelings against “Mr. Wizard.”

The piece de resistance is the unblowoutable candle. Each of the kids gets a funnel.

“Excuse me,” Bryan says. “I think I know. May I have one for demonstration purposes only. The air gets spread . . .”

“Yes,” says Kevin, who’s not going to be left out. “It makes it . . .”

Jason Oliver puts the thin end of the funnel to his mouth and blows at the candle. The flame doesn’t go out; it comes toward him.

” . . . spread,” Kevin finishes.

“And that,” Kleist says, “Is the Bernoulli principle: Air tends to spread.”

“Is the class almost over?” Bryan asks. I want to try the vinegar on the glass.”

So will this inspire them all to become scientists?

Well, Bryan wants to be a chemist working with robots. His Uncle Bill is a chemist. Rebecca wants to be a science teacher. Michael Nelson wants to be a lung specialist, ever since he cut up the dog’s lung at the last Science Center class.

Miah Rosenburg wants to be a scientist, and image-conscious Kevin wants to be an F-14 pilot. Though he is a kid who is learning the violin and Japanese as an at-home student under his mother.

A Budding Scientist

“I want to be a scientist because it’s unpopular,” Ben says mysteriously.

Then, the two hours are up. The door opens and the parents come in to collect their charges.

“He can boast he has dissected a cow’s eye at the age of 6,” Jason’s mom says proudly. She’s a teacher in Poway. “He loves these classes. Tonight, we’re going to the Dance Theatre of Harlem.”

The class forms into families, and outside, melts into the shifting waves of scientific thrill-seekers. Most are here to see the Omnimax film shows, but they can’t resist the invitation to pull levers that lift water, start centrifugal forces or scatter sand. They watch heaters growing embryos, sub-atomic particles drop from artificial clouds and ants piling up their dead in a cemetery of a dying, queenless colony. A father tries to make bellows utter words. It sort of moos.

“Someone ought to milk that thing,” he mutters, giving up.

Kids whisper to each other from discs on opposite sides of the big room. Hands pull in electric fingers on the lightning globe. Pinball wizards zing metal balls around a gravity bowl to see how the planets react to gravity--but mainly just to wait for the ball to make its intense yobble down the plug hole.

As a museum, it is an intensely active place. It has served as host to countless school parties and perhaps inspired many a young mind into considering science. But Kirsch and Kennedy’s nightmare of the Fleet Space Theater and Science Center being, in the end, just a glorified penny arcade is always there.

And their eerie feeling that they may be trapped in a sponge-rubber, middle-class prison--when they desperately need to get beyond preaching to the converted and titillating the bored--is going to occupy a lot of their time as they seek to be relevant and useful as well as fun in the years up to 2003.