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In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the Academy of Sciences has a larger-than-life rattlesnake jaw with fangs, which snaps shut at the push of a button, and an instant earthquake showing the heaving innards of the earth. Oregon's imaginative Museum of Science and Industry in Portland offers a "micro-zoo" that, by magnifying a drop of water 200 times, reveals the teeming life in it. "We want to make a simple scientific statement the student will understand," says Executive Director Loren McKinley. "We don't go in for pinball exhibits."
The Los Angeles museum glitters with flashing lights, which help attract 10,000 Southern California students each month to learn by personal discovery. When the visitor puts his finger on a generator and pushes a button, he transmits the electricity stored up in his body to a neon tube, which then glows. At an ingenious IBM exhibit called Mathematica, designed by Charles and Ray Eames, bulbs light up to demonstrate what happens when a number is squared or cubed. After a tour through a giant animated atom, students can test their newly acquired knowledge on a teaching machine.
"Scram" & Sonar. The Atomic Energy Commission's Atomsville is the highlight of New York's still-aborning museum. Parents are not allowed inside Atomsville, but through television they can watch children simulate bending a beam of electrons, handle "radio active" material with mechanical hands, and run a mock reactor that will shut off when it reaches the "scram" level —just as it does at Oak Ridge.
Two of the oldest museums are among the best. The Science Museum of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute boasts 425 audience-participation devices ranging from a simple prism that refracts light rays to a 350-ton Baldwin locomotive that moves up and down a track. Boston's "science smorgasbord," as Director Henry Bradford Washburn calls it, includes a bucket pendulum that dribbles sand in harmonic patterns, a working cloud chamber, and a reproduction of a ship's bridge equipped with radar, sonar, gyroscopes, steering mechanism and a view of the Charles River.
Holding Down Advertising. Science and industry exhibits are necessarily a collaboration between museums and private industry. Some smaller museums sometimes have to accept a big dose of advertising along with exhibits of doubtful scholarship. By contrast, Chicago's booming Museum of Science and Industry can invite companies to supply elaborate displays that meet its main educational requirement, which is to trace the sequence of an industrial development from the basic scientific discovery to its future applications. Even though they get credit only in modest plaques, firms are eager to respond; the museum's 14 acres of floor space house $25 million worth of exhibits paid for by 50 major U.S. corporations. Last week Moscow announced that its first show in the U.S. of Soviet space exploits will be put on in Chicago next year.