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Science, Technology, Natural History Museums?
beadfulthings writes "An unexpected windfall has enabled my husband and me to plan a road trip next year. He's expressed a wish to visit some good science, technology, and natural history museums along the way. Of course it's easy to obtain a long list of them via Google, but I'd like some insight and input. What does your area or city in the US or Canada have in the way of science museums? Are they worth traveling to visit? Do you have any particular favorite exhibits or 'must see' recommendations? This man was brought up in Philadelphia and apparently spent most of his boyhood and adolescence at the Franklin Institute and its Fels Planetarium, so I guess that would be his 'gold standard.' I grew up going to the Smithsonian. Any area of science, math, technology, natural history, or even industrial stuff would be fair game. I think we'll probably want to miss out on the 'creation science' stuff."
Yes it's a "Kids" museum, but if you like anything hands on, it's awesome. Even to a 25 year old BSME.
http://www.childrensmuseum.org/
That and the museums in Chicago.
The field museum in Chicago has an exhibit on Pirates (the old-fashioned kind). It's awesome. Go there.
The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan has a large variety of automobile, historical, and industrial/manufacturing exhibits. http://www.thehenryford.org/
Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.
Check out The Geek Atlas by John Graham-Cumming.
Exploratorium in San Francisco
Balboa Park in San Diego
Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
Kennedy Space Center in Florida
The Computer History Museum is free and has an unbelievable collection of computer artifacts. It is in the Bay Area, so there are lots of other things you can see in San Francisco, San Jose, etc. I will leave recommendation of those up to others who will certainly chime in.
Here is a link to the museum: http://www.computerhistory.org/
Enjoy your trip!
Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
+1 The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has several one-of-a-kind exhibits, including a German submarine, a simulated coal mine, and an incredible art-deco streamline modern train.
They even have a museum of people who used to go to museums. Make sure you're out before closing time.
which is totally what she said
I second the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
Everything from a working Difference Engine to the Crays and Connection Machines that we kids dreamed about in the 80s. A fully-functional PDP-1; it still plays Slug Russel's "Space War". Within an hour's drive of anywhere in the Bay Area.
I'll see your computers and raise you some nukes. Next time you're in Vegas for some trade show or conference, take a day and see the Atomic Testing Museum, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Thankfully, there's nothing fully-functional here, but there lots of fascinating artifacts nonetheless. Everything from Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, to bits and pieces of a NERVA nuclear rocket prototype, to engineers' notebooks filled with humorous mementos of projects they'd worked on, to Doc Edgerton's impossibly-fast cameras. Within a 10 minute cab ride from the Strip.
Although both museums have material suitable for laypeople and/or children, they're targeted primarily at adults with engineering backgrounds. Expect to spend at least 3 hours at each of 'em.
Nukes are pretty cool, but you can have a lot more fun with a bunch of used pinball machine parts. And everything is fully functional in the Pinball Hall of Fame. Hey, you're already in Vegas -- flashing lights and wacky sounds are what it's all about. You won't need a DeLorean to go back in time, and it'll cost a lot less per hour than the blackjack tables.
to see what their view of the zoological world is would be very interesting.
Answer: God made it.
It's not all that interesting a viewpoint. My grandpa sent me a few books recently on evolution (after I stopped attending church last year), and the ways in which creationists try to use science to prove their points would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing. In a couple of the books people who clearly don't understand the difference between open/closed systems try to use the laws of thermodynamics to disprove evolution. It's pathetic. Life exists and evolves in a kind of battle against entropy sure, but it doesn't defy the laws of thermodynamics because the earth is getting new energy from Sol all the time. They also claim that evolution via random mutation is simply impossible, even though a scientist last year demonstrated that bacteria can evolve new traits from a series of presumably random mutations. I hope more people do as I have done and learn to just accept the truth (even if it means admitting a lot of their life thus far was based on a lie) rather than fighting a worthless battle against it.
which is totally what she said
You didn't specify continent, so:
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/
they have some really good exhibits showing documented evidence which supports the Creationist view.
What? There's evidence that a superbeing created the universe? If that were indeed true, the discover(s) would be a shoe-in for a Nobel Prize.
Trolling is a art,
wear flowers in your hair, and visit:
Exploratorium. This is the original hands on museum.
The Golden Gate Park: Strybing Arboretum, Beautiful, stunning diversity, reminder of what that giant ball in the sky is for... oh and, ummm.... Biological Studies.
California Academy of Science is nice too, as is the DeYoung.
Over the bridge in Berkley is the Lawrence Hall of Science. I remember spending a little time with Liza there on a Pdp-11!
Chabot Space and Science Observatory is a great little place to study the stars.
Shockly's Semiconductor Labratory is also nearby: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laboratory. Not much to see, but Palo Alto is a mecca of technology.
and of course, the Computer History Museum.
http://www.computerhistory.org/about/
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I'm not sure if you're trolling, but in case you're one of those people trapped in a religious school that pretends to teach biology (and I'm gonna ignore at least three major factual errors in your biological diatribe, because I wanna talk theology with you anyways.)
The problem with YEC types is that they aren't giving God the benefit of the doubt. And they're ignoring the awe-inspiring experiences that - assuming He exists - God's set out there for us to figure out. We've got answers most of the things in God's rant in the Book of Job, "Thus Spake God The Lord Out Of The Whirlwind", yet God could still lay that rant on us, He'd just have to change the scientific questions.
One thing is absolutely certain about our Universe. No God hashed the whole thing together in a week some time around the invention of human writing, and He sure as hell didn't fill it with faked evidence that it's much older than 6000 years. That's the kind of hack job a human would imagine.
God, if He exists, is way smarter than that.
Now, take a Being that could, by nudging a couple of mathematical entities (branes), set things up such that when they intersect, a different mathematical entity (a universe) gets spawned, and one of them (maybe more than one, but how would we humans know?) just happens to be spawned with physical constants suitable for stellar nucleosynthesis, and some 13.2 billion years later - intelligent life evolves on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet that's smart enough to notice (stellar parallax) that the nearest stars are very far away, some of them vary regularly (Cepheid variables), and can be used as yardsticks to compute the distance to other consistently-bright objects (supernovae), which could be used as yardsticks to compute the distance to galaxies, which revealed the Hubble red shift, and ultimately, the mapping of variances in the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang...
And that's just the stuff we've managed to figure out, all by using the big brains our universe and our biosphere and natural selection has enabled us to evolve.
My God created something 13.2 billion years ago that continues to boggle the world's greatest physicsts. Science is a game we play with Him to figure out what His rules are. The smarter we physicsts get, and the more we learn about His creation, the smarter our God has to have been in order for us to still be perplexed by the awesomeness of it all.
Six thousand years? Painstakingly creating each species, one at a time? Your God appears to be a obsessive-compulsive micromanager who - if you're going to use the Bible as your "science" textbook - hasn't revealed a damn thing about Himself to us since the days of the Roman Empire. Stop shrinking God to human standards and timeframes. If you don't comprehend a 13.2 billion year old universe, if you don't fathom a 4.6 billion year old Earth, and if you don't like how amazingly awesome it is that sentience evolved a mere 50,000 years ago - barely a tip on a 3-billion-year-old iceberg of biological awesomeness - then please, give God the benefit of the doubt that He might have done something you can't understand, to say nothing of what a shephard wrote 4000 years ago.