Open Letter to the Museum of Science

[rhu]

We are long-time members and took our kids to the Pompeii exhibit last week. I was very impressed with this exhibit --- the material was well-presented, interesting, and accessible to my 8- and 10-year-old without being patronizing.

Unlike, say, the "Star Wars" exhibit from a few years ago, the artifacts and information here were authentic and deepened our children's understanding of the real world. And unlike the Einstein exhibit from a few years ago, I didn't feel like there was any "filler" material to make the exhibit take up enough space, nor was there "dumbing down" of material to make it more accessible at the cost of accuracy.

My only complaint is that, given that you are the Museum of Science, there was not more attention given to the sciences of archaeology and/or vulcanology. I do think that this exhibit was appropriate for a science museum because archaeology is indeed a science, but I would have liked if if you had been able to make that connection more explicitly.

But this is a mere quibble; we spent two glorious hours in this exhibit, and we've been recommending it to all our friends. Congratulations on a first-class presentation. This is the sort of exhibit that makes me glad to be a member and a supporter of your important institution.

[I emailed this to them earlier today]

Comments

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

I can't speak officially for the museum, but thank you. :-) However, the Museum can't take too much credit; the main exhibit is primarily the product of the Italian state archaeological agency. If you happened to see any of the redcoats with carts, their activities were MoS material. The Museum had a lot more to do with the vulcanology section, which was unfortunately but necessarily separate from the main artifact rooms, and coming at the end of the exhibit like that I suspect a lot of people are just trying to exit by then and may not be able to take the time to take that part in.

The Star Wars exhibit....well, it made a lot of money, which allowed for things like the planetarium renovation. Any other opinions I may have I should probably keep to myself.

I'm curious about your opinions about the Einstein exhibit. It also was not primarily the product of the MoS Boston; that was the work of the American Museum of Natural History and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (iirc, Einstein bequeathed pretty much all his stuff to them, so all the original objects were on loan from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). I put in a fair amount of time volunteering in that exhibit, but I don't recall any horrible misrepresentations or inaccuracies, probably because it was six years ago.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The Einstein exhibit was so long ago that I really can't be more specific than what I recall of my general impressions. What I meant by "dumbing down at the cost of accuracy" was that there was, IIRC, too much of a reliance on metaphors that don't quite map to the physics, without establishing the boundary of which properties of the metaphor do and do not correspond to the physics.