Science for Today
The future is here. Technologies like cloning, space flight and satellite navigation--once seen only in Tomorrowland--now suffuse our daily lives. But are we ready for the future? Maybe not, according to a recent National Science Foundation survey in which Americans seemed unaware of basic science and the technologies likely to shape the next millennium. More than half the adults polled, for instance, did not know that electrons are smaller than atoms, and nearly half did not realize that the Earth revolves around the sun.
Part of the problem lies with American education, which often presents science dryly, not as a tool for living but as something for a student to memorize. The opening Saturday of the California Science Center should go a long way toward bringing science home. Constructed with federal, state and private funds, the $130-million admission-free museum in Exposition Park was created by educators who realize, as museum program director Loren Behr puts it, that Americans have increasingly come to see science as “a black box.” “In our society,” Behr notes, “we tend to have a lot of confidence in science to solve our problems but we have absolutely no idea about how scientists arrive at the solutions.”
The Science Center deftly opens the box. Unlike the Museum of Science and Industry that it replaces, where dusty jars of pomegranate jellies paid solemn tribute to Southern California’s past and rocket engines pointed to the future, the Science Center actively engages visitors, making them think from the moment they land on its steps.
“If the world is spinning,” asks one paving stone near the entrance, “Why don’t I get dizzy?” (The Earth is so big that it takes 24 hours to make a single revolution, tame compared to a carnival ride.)
Visitors can proceed to either of two exhibition halls: Creative World, where one exhibit lets them assemble buildings, then see how the structures stand up to a major earthquake, and World of Life, where exhibits encourage visitors to compare how life forms “from apple trees to honey bees” take in energy, react to the surrounding world, reproduce and pass on genetic information.
The California Science Center doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. The curator’s note on one exhibit, reflecting a real-life debate in science, reads: “Viruses are a kind of life, or maybe they’re not. It’s hard to say if a virus is a living thing.”
The Science Center sits solidly amid its surrounding urban and minority community. In an inspired move that demonstrates that the museum is a living part of the community, parents and students from the neighborhood have been hired to work as tour guides and aides in the complex’s Education Resource Center, where they can help children learn to use multimedia computers, books and study areas. And this fall, construction will start on a $30-million science-focused neighborhood elementary school on the center grounds. This is a grand proposal; a recent study found that students in schools with the highest minority enrollments had less than a 50% chance of getting a licensed science or mathematics teacher.
The future is here. And yes, with resources like the California Science Center, we’re ready for it.