The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [168]
• You examine a detailed reconstruction of a procession of priests climbing up one of the great ziggurats of Sumer, or a gorgeously painted tomb in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt, or a house in ancient Rome, or a full-scale turn-of-the-century street in small town America. You think of all those civilizations, so different from yours, how if you’d been born into them you would have thought them completely natural, how you’d consider our society - if you had somehow been told of it - as weird...
• You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out on to the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life, strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science-fiction movie...
• Seated in the theatre, you find yourself inside the head of an eleven-year-old boy. You look out through his eyes. You encounter his typical daily crises: bullies, authoritarian adults, crushes on girls. You hear the voice inside his head. You witness his neurological and hormonal responses to his social environment. And you get to wonder how you work on the inside...
• Following the simple instructions, you type in the commands. What will the Earth look like if we continue to burn coal, oil and gas, and double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? How much hotter will it be? How much polar ice will melt? How much higher will the oceans be? Why are we pouring so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? What if we put five times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Also, how could anybody know what the future^climate will be like? It gets you thinking...
In my childhood, I was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I was transfixed by the dioramas -lifelike representations of animals and their habitats all over the world. Penguins on the dimly lit Antarctic ice; okapi in the bright African veldt; a family of gorillas, the male beating his chest, in a shaded forest glade; an American grizzly bear standing on his hind legs, ten or twelve feet tall, and staring me right in the eye. These were three-dimensional freeze-frames captured by some genie of the lamp. Did the grizzly move just then? Did the gorilla blink? Might the genie return, lift the spell and permit this gorgeous array of living things to go on with their lives as, jaws agape, I watch?
Kids have an irresistible urge to touch. Back in those days, the most commonly heard two words in museums were ‘don’t touch’. Decades ago there was almost nothing ‘hands-on’ in museums of science or natural history, not even a simulated tidal pool in which you could pick up a crab and inspect it. The closest thing to an interactive exhibit that I knew were the scales in the Hayden Planetarium, one for each planet. Weighing a mere forty pounds on Earth, there was something reassuring in the thought that if only you lived on Jupiter, you would weigh a hundred pounds. But sadly, on the Moon you would weigh only seven pounds; on the Moon it seemed you would hardly be there at all.
Today, children are encouraged to touch, to poke, to run through a branched contingency tree of questions and answers via computer, or to make funny noises and see what the sound waves look like. Even kids who don’t get everything out of the exhibit, or who don’t even get the point of the exhibit, usually extract something valuable. You go to these museums and you’re struck by the wide-eyed looks of wonder, by kids racing from exhibit to exhibit, by the triumphant smiles of discovery. They’re wildly popular. Almost as many of us go to them each year as attend professional baseball, basketball and football games combined.
These exhibits do not