So upon being assigned a visit to the Museum of Science I decided to go with my friend Zhihua Ma. He had not been to the museum before but as I had grown up in Massachusetts’s schools I had paid many a visit there and even done the fabled overnight at the museum. I was very happy in retrospect to have chosen to go with a newbie though. He looked upon all the exhibits with fresh awe and inspired me to look at things that I may have just written off as the same as when I had been there years ago. The three exhibits that we had to see, Conserve at Home, Innovative engineers, and Energized!. These were all exhibits that were new to me and were all interesting and informative in their own right. In the Innovative Engineers exhibit there was a video booth where we could choose which engineers video we wanted to watch. My favorite by far was the story of the creator of Kevlar, Stephanie Kwolek. It was interesting to hear the perspective of the person who had discovered such an incredible material and cool to see how passionate she was on the subject. She could not have been more of an embodiment of her statement of “I think the role of science is to improve human life in general.” She was clearly proud of her product and happy that she had helped the world.
The exhibit I think I truly learned the most at was, Conserve at Home. It was amazing to see the ways that they represented energy use in the household and how much their simple tips did to save electricity. One such example that truly struck me was the light bulb experiment. There were several different styles of light bulbs in a row and by turning a handle and toggling between them, you could see how much energy they needed to be bright, or to light up at all. Also there was an experiment with a tube of water with several outlets at them bottom that water flowed out of to represent how fast certain appliances consumed electricity.
This made an immediate impact on me, a visual display at how quickly watts of electricity can be used up just by using different things made me realize how important making an appliance efficient is. Another interesting part of this exhibit was the little pictures of what recyclable materials can be turned into. Such as steel cans into bicycles, or plastic bottles being turned into furniture. It was reaffirming to see the pictures and know that recycling really is a worthwhile process with real results beyond recycled cardboard.
The third exhibit Energized!, was also very interesting but a lot was information I had previously heard/known. The greatest thing I took away from Energized! Exhibit was from the below pictured map.
It shows the location of all the photovoltaic, advanced biomass power conversion, fuel cell, hydroelectric, landfill gas, and wind energy sites in Massachusetts up to 2011. I never realized how many there were and it was interesting to see a map with them laid out. The trip was fun and I actually ended up going back the next day to a few Omni movies that were also very interesting to see just like the rest of the museum had proved to be the day before.