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Photograph by Chad Pilster
It Pays to Discover: Contemplating the relationship of the other planets to our own lends a useful perspective to daily life.
The Discovery Museum can teach adults valuable lessons
By Vern Hansen
Many of you who read this newspaper have visited the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose. If not, may I invite you on a guided tour to one of its outstanding exhibits?
Walk forward with me from the entrance, almost the length of the building and look to your left, where you will see a wide staircase leading to a balcony overlooking the main floor. Follow me up the stairs and turn to the right. Walk far enough forward to be in line with the direction you took on the floor below.
You'll see some glass display cases concerning our solar system. Look at the one that shows, in scale, the distance between our moon and the earth. The moon, on your left, is a round object about the size of a piece of birdshot, on top of a needle-like stem about 4 inches high.
About 6 to 8 inches from the moon is another needle-like stem with a larger round object atop it representing Earth. Though larger than the moon, it is so small that the entire North American continent would be probably no larger than 1/32nd-of-an-inch square. On such a scale, you can imagine how diminished would be the Bay Area.
Now, following the instructions given to the exhibit's viewer, look back toward the entrance of the museum. Above the door is a round yellow object that looks to be about the size of a grapefruit. Actually, at 180 feet away from where we stand, it is about 20 inches in diameter. We did not see it when we entered the museum because we had no reason to look up as we did so.
This object represents our sun in the same scale as the moon and the earth.
Where, in scale, do you think Pluto, the outermost planet in our solar system, would be?
Somewhere near Spartan Stadium.
Where do you think the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, would be?
It would be so far distant that it could not be seen from anywhere on Earth.
That's scary.
Despite all the UFO furor, as far as we know, there is nobody we can reach with an S.O.S., if Lifeboat Earth is need of help.
It as though, God--or whatever you choose to call the intelligence that controls the galaxies, the solar systems and the planets in their orbits--has said: "I have given you a lifeboat in an unfathomable cosmic sea; and all that you need to do is construct your oars, but it is up to you to learn to pull together."
Let us leave the balcony at the Children's Discovery Museum, return to the main floor and take another staircase down to a room where we see interesting exhibits about soap bubbles.
There is a glass box, slightly less than 3 feet square and about as high. Inside this box, soap bubbles are floating. Whether it is warm air or whatever that keeps these soap bubbles afloat, defying gravity, we are fascinated.
On a shelf nearby is a tray of soap-bubble mix and a couple of pipes that we are invited to use to hold over the box and blow bubbles on our own. They, too, float like the rest. Maybe for as long as five minutes before they break. They often do not touch each other. But, when they do, two smaller bubbles become a larger bubble, about the size of a soccer ball. Its colors of blue, red, orange and yellow make it a beautiful thing to behold. And we enjoy its beauty for several moments before it breaks.
On one of the walls in this room, we are informed that "... the film of a soap bubble is one of the thinnest things that can be seen by the naked eye. It would take about 5,000 such films to be as thick as a single human hair."
Our astronauts' photographs from outer space have shown us a lovely blue-and-white sphere floating in space. Like a bubble in the Children's Discovery Museum.
Our Earth is not a bubble. Neither is it invulnerable. And no one is offering us a tray of terrestrial material and a bubble pipe for another one, if we can't hold this one together.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
