The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [170]
In 1983 Levin and Levine placed a small ad in our local paper inviting the community to discuss the idea. Fifty people showed up. From that group came the first board of directors of the Sciencenter. Within a year they secured exhibition space in the first floor of an unrented office building. When the owner found a paying tenant, the tadpoles and litmus paper were packed up again and carted off to a vacant shop.
Moves to other empty shops followed until an Ithacan named Bob Leathers, an architect world-renowned for designing innovative community-built playgrounds, drew up and donated the plans for a permanent Sciencenter. Gifts from local firms provided enough money to purchase an abandoned lot from the city and then hire an executive director, Charles Trautmann, a Cornell civil engineer. He and Leathers travelled to the annual meeting of the National Association of Homebuilders in Atlanta. Trautmann relates how they told the story ‘of a community eager to take responsibility for the education of its youth and secured donations of many key items such as windows, skylights and lumber’.
Before they could start building, some of the old pumphouse on the site had to be torn down. Members of a Cornell fraternity were enlisted. With hardhats and sledge-hammers, they demolished the place joyfully. ‘This is the kind of thing,’ they said, ‘we usually get into trouble for doing.’ In two days, they carted away 200 tons of rubble.
What followed were images straight out of an America that many of us fear has vanished. In the tradition of pioneer barnrais-ing, members of the community - bricklayers, doctors, carpenters, university professors, plumbers, farmers, the very young and the very old - all rolled up their sleeves to build the Sciencenter.
‘The continuous seven-days-a-week schedule was maintained,’ says Trautmann, ‘so that anyone would be able to help anytime. Everyone was given a job. Experienced volunteers built stairs, laid carpet and tile, and trimmed windows. Others painted, nailed and carried supplies.’ Some 2,200 townspeople donated more than 40,000 hours. Roughly ten per cent of the construction work was performed by people convicted of minor offences; they preferred to do something for the community than to sit idle in jail. Ten months later, Ithaca had the only community-built science museum in the world.
Among the seventy-five interactive exhibits emphasizing both the processes and principles of science are: the Magicam, a microscope that visitors can use to view on a colour monitor and then photograph any object at 40 times magnification; the world’s only public connection to the satellite-based National Lightning
Detection Network; a 6 x 9 ft walk-in camera; a fossil pit seeded with local shale where visitors hunt for fossils from 380 million years ago and keep their finds; an eight-foot-long boa constrictor named ‘Spot’; and a dazzling array of other experiments, computers and activities.
Levin and Levine can still be found there, full-time volunteers teaching the citizens and scientists of the future. The DeWitt Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund supports and extends their dream of reaching kids who would ordinarily be denied their scientific birthright. Through the Fund’s nationwide Youth-ALIVE programme, Ithaca teenagers receive intensive mentoring to develop their science, conflict resolution and employment skills.
Levin and Levine thought science should belong to everyone. Their community