. . . And Science for All

Elsa Feher was brought up in Buenos Aires to be a proper Argentine young lady. So it came as some surprise to her parents when instead of going to finishing school and marrying a rich man like the rest of her classmates in her proper British boarding school, she decided to become a physicist.

“I can still remember sitting in my living room looking at a Life magazine picture of electron clouds in the atom. And I thought, ‘Oh, wow! This is incredible stuff! I need to know more about this.’ ”

Now 64, Feher still has a knack for veering off on unexpected tracks, keeping family and colleagues on their toes.

Just last month, she decided to leave behind her most recent career--as director of the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego. Two of the exhibitions she created for the Fleet are touring the United States; a copy of one is touring Europe. And in October, her latest effort, called Signals--about the science of communication--opened to rave reviews in San Diego.

So why leave now, in the wake of such success?

“The world is wide,” Feher says. “There is an infinity of fabulous stuff out there to do.”

Whatever project fires her imagination next, you can bet it won’t be anything ordinary.

“What’s the fun of doing something easy?” she says.

The scientific subjects she’s presented to the general public through the Fleet are deep, abstract, subtle, highly mathematical. Indeed, they are the same questions that percolate through Nobel Prize-winning minds:

What’s a snowflake got to do with the origin of life?

What does a fun-house mirror tell us about the origin of matter?

How do you read a signal encoded in light from an exploding star, or riding on heat ripples from the first milliseconds of time?

It’s not the sort of fare one would expect from a public science center that hosts as many as 700,000 visitors a year--most of them totally untutored in science.

She’s gotten away with it, she says with a smile, because “I work fast. I got the money, and before anybody knew what was happening, it was already done.”

The National Science Foundation gave her a million dollars for Signals and supported her previous efforts--Symmetry and About Faces--to the tune of nearly $350,000.

The amazing thing is, she makes it look so effortless and appealing. “I always tell people it’s like Baryshnikov leaping,” she says. “It’s got to look easy.”

Picture this scene at a recent showing of Symmetry:

The small exhibit center was packed with families, old folks, smooching couples, aging hippies . . . the same crowd you might find enjoying a sunset on a public beach. All to the background noises of “Look at this!” Or just as often, “Mira esto!”

An elderly man wearing Hush Puppies and a backward baseball cap played with do-it-yourself molecules that fit together only in certain symmetrical patterns. Nearby were samples of actual crystals created by Nature on the same molecular scaffolding.

A businesslike woman in heels and hose fiddled with a computerized image of her face that reversed the left side and the right. The result looked strangely unfamiliar. A man sat with his small son in his lap, singing Spanish songs into a microphone that turned words backward and upside down. Some tunes, like some faces, are more symmetrical than others. Spanish is far more symmetrical than English. Latin more symmetrical still.

A couple of tourists with backpacks pondered tiling patterns similar to those explored by mathematicians and physicists.

What does symmetry have to do with science? Essentially, symmetry is the mathematics that shows which situations are interchangeable and which are not. A snowflake looks exactly the same upside down or right side up. But a left hand and a right hand can never look exactly the same--except in a mirror.

Symmetries are the basis of all the fundamental laws of nature. And “broken” symmetries are responsible for almost all the interesting outcomes--including life. Most molecules come in two versions, mirror images of each other. Yet almost all the DNA of all living creatures spirals to one direction only--like left- or right-handed screws. No one knows why. But it is almost certain that this curious break in symmetry offers clues to the origin of life.

Feher’s exhibits pose questions rather than answers. And that’s the point.

Most science education in schools, she notes, consists of giving explanations of phenomena most people have never seen. “That puts the cart before the horse,” she says. “People think that science is a correct explanation. But science is the world around you.”

Explanations are helpful, but they change in time, as more is learned, she explains. Instead of learning explanations, people should make up explanations, then test whether or not they are true.

To that end, Feher’s exhibits present phenomena that can be manipulated by visitors. “We abstract some element of the natural world so that people can mess around with it.”

People come up with explanations about how things work and test them on the exhibits. “You make mistakes,” she says. “It’s not that you’re dumb. If your explanation leads you to do further experiments, then it’s worthwhile.”

*

Creating a science center was not on Feher’s agenda when she came to UC San Diego in 1961 to study crystals for her doctorate work at Columbia University in New York. Feher was conducting experiments to see how the crystals respond when put under intense pressure. “I was squeezing crystals,” she says. “There were enough crystals to squeeze to keep me busy for a whole career.”

But the new university was short of teachers, so she pitched in--and found she liked explaining things. She also found she was good at it. “Students would come up and say: ‘I was trying to understand this, and I never could, and now I do.’ ”

Then her husband, George Feher, also a UCSD physicist, took his sabbatical year in Boston--which was a hotbed of a revolution in science education in the 1960s, spurred by the Russian launch of Sputnik and the U.S. scramble to catch up. Everyone was talking about the educational theories of psychologist Jean Piaget, and her own two small daughters gave her a personal interest in how children learn. Feher soon got involved in creating hands-on science materials for teachers. When she came back to San Diego, she put her career as an experimental physicist on permanent hold and took a job creating a new science curriculum for teachers at San Diego State.

The move shocked friends and colleagues. “It was a move down by all objective viewpoints,” she says. “It was a major risk to leave the protected position at UCSD and take a position at San Diego State, which was considered a second-rate institution [for a research physicist].” And unlike scientific research, science education wasn’t considered a prestigious field.

But Feher thought training teachers was socially more important than studying crystals. So she created a course designed to teach teachers in science using experiments they could then take into their classrooms. It started as an elective course, with three students. Within a few years, the program had expanded into three required semester-long courses.

Feher was permanently hooked. “I found that what I really liked to do was to find ways of simplifying things without betraying the scientific concept.”

Therefore, she was ripe for the plucking in 1983 when a new director showed up at the Fleet museum in Balboa Park and asked her if she thought she could do something with a sleepy area in the corner, where nothing much ever happened. She said she could.

*

To learn something about the museum business, she spent a month at physicist Frank Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking science museum--the Exploratorium--in San Francisco. “I really felt I had come to a home that I didn’t know existed,” she said. “It fit like an oiled glove.” Oppenheimer’s whole philosophy centered on presenting natural phenomena in ways that invited unfettered exploration and outright play.

When Feher came back to San Diego, she got to work making the Fleet into a world-class center that today rivals the Exploratorium in many ways.

One thing that helped was that Feher, like Oppenheimer, was an experimenter who knew how to build things from scratch. For her crystal experiments, she wound her own copper magnets. (Her husband later made her a wedding ring out of the same copper enamel.)

“I’m not a paper-and-pencil theoretician,” she says. “I’m an experimentalist. So I can talk to the exhibit builders; we have a common language.”

Her years as a working physicist also enabled her to understand concepts in the deep way necessary to be a good explainer to the general public. Recent studies of science illiteracy in the U.S. found that many students had very little understanding of basic concepts--even when they could answer questions on tests. They could repeat back the explanations they read in the books, but they didn’t have a clue as to how to go about asking questions of Nature themselves.

“You always have to be teaching at a lesser level than you understand,” Feher says. “If you’re teaching what you don’t quite understand, it can come out really bad.”

*

From the very beginning, Feher wanted the science center at Fleet to be about information--the technology of the 21st century. “This is a small museum. It should be a boutique, not a department store.”

With the opening of Signals, she has accomplished her goal.

A casual visitor, at first, might wonder what some of the exhibitry has to do with information. For example, there’s a film of the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington writhing and twisting like a worm as the wind whipped up a resonance that eventually broke the structure into pieces. Yet it’s the same principle of sympathetic vibration that allows you to tune in to a single radio station transmitting on one frequency while shutting out the dozens of others streaming in through the walls of your car or house.

Of course, signals can also travel via a string stretched between two tin cans. But some methods of getting from here to there are better than others.

To make this point, an exhibit called Time of Travel allows you to stage a race between three kinds of signals: a sound signal, a light signal and a moving ball. At the push of a button, you send a pulse of laser light, a loud beep and a Ping-Pong ball zooming around the small exhibit space--a racetrack about 400 feet long.

The light returns to its starting point so quickly it seems instantaneous. The sound returns one-third of a second later, a fast echo. The ball arrives 16 seconds later.

Many people don’t realize, Feher says, that the sounds you make when you talk on the telephone do not travel through the phone lines to your friend, say, in New York. They travel, in fact, on electromagnetic waves, at the speed of light.

Indeed, one of Feher’s favorite exhibits is a telephone with a variable delay in the signal, because it reminds her of phone conversations from her days in Argentina. “You would hear your own voice coming back at you while the other people were talking,” she says. “So this one is dear to my heart.”

Signaling can mean the difference between life and death in biological systems that signal each other through nerve impulses, and some of the most thought-provoking exhibits in Signals are variations on this theme: how fireflies signal each other to synchronize their flashes; how the brain signals leg muscles to ride a bike; how light signals coming into the eye send messages to the brain.

Most of science, in fact, is a matter of learning to read the ever more subtle signals that Nature sends out, and trying to decode their meaning.

The same might be said about relationships among people. Indeed, one of the exhibits on sending codes has an interesting historical (and personal) origin. A visitor can send a message on light waves by changing “phase” (or roughly, position) of the waves. Because the naked eye can’t see phase changes, the encoded messages can be picked up only with special detectors.

George Feher developed such a secret optical system in the early 1940s, before the establishment of the state of Israel, while he was working in the Jewish underground movement for independence from Britain. His system allowed the sending of secret messages from a neon Star of David atop a hospital in Haifa, encoded on phase changes, in standard Morse code. Even though anyone could see the light, the enemy had no way of knowing that secret messages were being sent because the human eye can’t perceive phase shifts.

Recently, George Feher returned from Europe, where he heard nothing but praise for Elsa’s exhibit--About Faces--that is traveling there. “I’m very proud of her,” he says. “Everybody knew about it.”

He’s also a little fearful of where her latest turn will take her--given her history of starting new careers from scratch. For now, she’s studying various options, taking yoga and holding discussions with her sociologist daughter about developing a hands-on science center dedicated to the social sciences.

(Alas, she’s off her roller-blades, since a broken arm while skating on the UCSD campus put her out of commission. Rock-climbing and windsurfing are other past pastimes.)

But by now Feher’s husband is accustomed to being taken by surprise. As he put it, paraphrasing a famous quotation in physics:

“Most people watch waves; a few people ride waves; and very few people make waves.”

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Elsa Feher

Background: Born in Buenos Aires 64 years ago. Father was a lawyer and prominent Egyptologist; mother trained as a teacher. Came to United States at 25 for graduate studies at Columbia University in New York. Moved to San Diego in 1961.

Claims to fame: Departing director of Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in San Diego. Two exhibitions she created for the Fleet are touring the United States; a copy of one is touring Europe. And in October, her latest effort--Signals, about the science of communication--opened to rave reviews in San Diego.

Family: Married to UCSD physics professor George Feher since 1961. Lives in La Jolla. Two daughters: Shoshanah, sociologist in Venice, and Paola, a mountain climber and body mechanics specialist based in Bozeman, Mont.

Passions: “Too many to list,” including ideas, music, dancing, most physical endeavors that don’t involve competition and “an enormous interest in what makes people tick.”

On the wonder of science: “People think that science is a correct explanation. But science is the world around you.”

On what comes next: “The thing that comes with age is that you have a lot of background experiences to build on. . . . The world is wide. There is an infinity of fabulous stuff out there to do.”