The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [169]
Another glorious feature of many modern scientific museums is a movie theatre showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten storeys tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, the most popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. To Fly brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I’ve seen religious leaders of many denominations witness Blue Planet and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth’s environment.
Not every exhibit and science museum is exemplary. A few still are commercials for firms that have contributed money to promote their products - how an automobile engine works or the ‘cleanliness’ of one fossil fuel as compared to another. Too many museums that claim to be about science are really about technology and medicine. Too many biology exhibits are still afraid to mention the key idea of modern biology: evolution. Beings ‘develop’ or ‘emerge’, but never evolve. The absence of humans from the deep fossil record is underplayed. We are shown nothing of the anatomical and DNA near-identity between humans and chimps or gorillas. Nothing is displayed on complex organic molecules in space and on other worlds, nor about experiments showing the stuff of life forming in enormous numbers in the known atmospheres of other worlds and the presumptive atmosphere of the early Earth. A notable exception: the Natural History Museum of The Smithsonian Institution once had an unforgettable exhibit on evolution. It began with two cockroaches in a modern kitchen with open cereal boxes and other food. Left alone for a few weeks, the place was crowded with cockroaches, buckets of them everywhere, competing for the little food now available, and the long-term hereditary advantage that a slightly better adapted cockroach might have over its competitors became crystal clear. Also, too, many planetaria are still devoted to picking out constellations rather than travelling to other worlds, and depicting the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets; they also have an insect-like projector always visible which robs the sky of its reality.
Perhaps the grandest museum exhibit can’t be seen. It has no home: George Awad is one of the leading architectural model makers in America, specializing in skyscrapers. He is also a dedicated student of astronomy who has made a spectacular model of the Universe. Starting with a prosaic scene on Earth, and following a scheme proposed by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, he goes progressively by factors of ten to show us the whole Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Universe. Every astronomical body is meticulously detailed. You can lose yourself in them. It’s one of the best tools I know of to explain the scale and nature of the Universe to children. Isaac Asimov described it as ‘the most imaginative representation of the universe that I have ever seen, or could have conceived of. I could have wandered through it for hours, seeing something new at every turn that I hadn’t observed before.’ Versions of it ought to be available throughout the country - for stirring the imagination, for inspiration and for teaching. But instead, Mr Awad cannot give this exhibit to any major science museum in the country. No one is willing to devote to it the floor space needed. As I write, it still sits forlornly, crated in storage.
The population of my town, Ithaca, New York, doubles to a grand total of about 50,000 when Cornell University and Ithaca College are in session. Ethnically diverse, surrounded by farmland, it has suffered, like so much of the northeast, the decline of its nineteenth-century manufacturing base. Half the children at Bev-erly J. Martin elementary school, which our daughter attended,