Science Museum

I was in Rochester on the weekend of 10/3, and the girls and I spent about three hours at the Rochester Museum and Science Center. What an amazing place.

There's an adventure zone on the first floor with interactive exhibits. We used pulley systems to lift each other off the ground, and learned how using more pulleys makes it easier to lift, but makes the amount of rope you have to pull longer. There was a great exhibit about how chroma key works, and the girls got to see themselves superimposed on a weather map. It's harder than you'd think to point to the right place on the map. There's a surreal climbing structure supported by a net of wires that gave Soren the howling fantods because she thought the spaces between the wires were big enough that she could fall through. Emma walked her through a couple of times, though, and she ended up loving it. We learned about how sailboats position their sails to make use of the wind, even when it seems to be coming from the wrong direction.

Upstairs, there's a huge hands-on gallery with exhibits about sound, light, and electricity. Emma was off and running, so I hung out with Soren so we could proceed a little more slowly. Soren was very impressed to learn how speakers work by pushing and pulling the air. We generated electricity with a hand crank and saw how it could be stored in a capacitor. Some of the most interesting exhibits for Soren were the ones that dealt with the sense of sound. One showed how a delay made it hard to communicate, and one let you change the pitch of your voice. Soren found out that there are sounds too high and too low for humans to hear, and got to see how high and low she could hear.

On the third floor there are historical exhibits. One of these dealt with Fredrick Douglas (and slavery in general). The exhibits that hit home for Emma and Soren the most were the ones that showed different aspects of what life was like for a slave. They had real shackles, and a little room that simulated what it was like for the slaves in the tiny spaces they were crammed into on the boats to America. There was an exhibit about life in Rochester in the 1800s with a display of a dentist that made us all thankful for modern technology.

There was a twenty-minute show during the day about bats, a courtroom comedy about a man suing a bat for being nasty and destructive. The bat defended himself well, and in the process set the record straight about a lot of misconceptions concerning bats. Emma loved the show, and asked a question at the end about whether bats carried disease (she was thinking of Kelly having been bitten by a bat as a kid). The scientist explained how unlikely it is for a bat to carry rabies.

It was pretty much a whirlwind tour, but we learned some interesting things, and it gave me an idea of what all was there to be seen. It will be great to go back and spend more time poring over the things they found most intriguing. The $75 membership will definitely be worth it.