This past weekend, I batted my eyelashes at Tim to go to the Hayden Planetarium with me once I discovered it was a few blocks away from a wedding we were attending. We took all of Saturday afternoon to catch the latest planetarium show and browse the rest of the American Museum of Natural History. He had never been there, and I gravitated towards my favorite parts of the museum. We wandered around the Rose Center (mostly the Space part) and I rambled on and on about subsections of the exhibits, pointing out where our friends’ research projects lie, and that nice blank part of the universe’s timeline where the epoch of reionization and dark ages research will help fill in. Then, we went straight for the dinosaurs on the fourth floor, because, who doesn’t love dinos?! We wandered around the fossils, dodging kiddies and their overzealous picture-taking parents. There’s only so much of the mass of information that one can hope to absorb in any one visit, and I’m just trying to keep my sauropods and theropods and ornithischians straight. However, I did notice a subtle theme in many of the exhibit commentary. Here’s an example (check out the yellow box in particular):
Click for dinosaurian biggness!
Maybe I’m just paranoid (especially since Tim didn’t pick up on this until I pointed it out) but there were a number of displays asserting that the science doesn’t tell us the truth, or we’ll never know the answers, because the fossil evidence in incomplete or because the animals are not here to study directly. Although it’s a fair point to say that science doesn’t prove any theory beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that extracting answers from the tiny bits of fossils we do find is excruciating, tedious, and not exact, it was an odd point to be hammering home in a science display. After all, I personally marvel at what knowledge we can glean from incomplete evidence and at the self-correcting nature of science. That’s the kind of message I would send, especially in this era of mistrust and misunderstanding of science by so many people.
So, after we got our fill of dino fossils and expensive but admittedly delicious museum food, we headed to one of my other favorite areas, the Hall of Human Origins. I love to wonder what life was like for early hominids, including for those of our own species who were physically identical, but living in a totally different world 150,000 years ago. I marvel at the tenacity of Homo erectus who populated the Earth for 1.5 million years, whereas we’ve been here for a fraction of that. Anyway, as I was browsing, I noticed that the displays read differently than in the fossil halls:
Click for large version.
It asks a question, states that we don’t yet know, but that it is an area of active research. It puts forth a guess based on the best of our knowledge and leaves the reader wondering what we’ll find out next. This, I think, is far more exciting and educational and doesn’t do the whole process of science a disservice.
This was the first time that I looked beyond the information in an exhibit to the style of the presentation. It is important to know who your audience is and what message you want to send whenever doing science outreach or teaching. Students and museum patrons are probably not going to retain much specific information. Good teachers are aware of this and try to get across a general message about science and have to be cognizant of what that message is. It’s not easy to do this, but having a goal is a good start. You can tell that the designers of the different exhibits have different goals, or at least different opinions on what it is about science they want to convey. For what it’s worth, I think the latter example is going to be much more helpful in conveying the true nature of science to those who don’t live it everyday. And after all, isn’t that important? Isn’t that kind of transparency and understanding just what science needs?
Nicole
Tim
