Science, Technology, Natural History Museums? 435
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."
RandomDude (Score:2, Insightful)
Washington DC: Holocaust Museum, Smithsonian
Cambridge: MIT museum is really interesting. They have a 12 ft slide rule, and some other curiosities
New York: Natural history museum is really good
Re:Kansas (Score:2, Insightful)
Worst case scenario, you get a barrel of laughs.
Re:Kansas (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [newscientist.com]. 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.
Re:Creation Museum (Petersburg, KY) (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Recommendations? Seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for me? I expose myself to every input, at every venue I possibly can. Whether I disagree with the source is another matter, but *ignoring* the source is tantamount to saying that "I have made up my mind, and I believe your opinions are of utter disinterest."
It is perfectly ok to make up your mind at some point, and once you realize that creationism is meaningless drivel you really don't need to expose yourself to it again and again and again in the faint hope that it might all somehow make sense one day. Isn't that the definition of madness, doing the same thing over and over again in the hope of a different outcome?
Besides, you go on a roadtrip to have fun, not to be subjected to endless fundamentalist stupidity. I'd say skipping creationism-oriented museums is a perfectly valid approach.
Re:Recommendations? Seriously? (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a ridiculous argument.
In my 43 years I've never believed in a god or gods. (My parents must have raised me properly!) Would my time be better spent going to a museum/science exhibition to learn something or going to churches, synagogues, mosques, cult retreats, etc. to have supernatural woo-woo fed to me?
Going to the religious bits wouldn't make me a "bigger man", it'd make me a "man wasting his time".
Re:question about that article (Score:3, Insightful)
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.