Science Museum: Bringing knowledge to the people

Children scamper through the cavernous halls of the Science Museum of Virginia, followed by parents who, often to their surprise, find they are as interested in what they are learning as the youngsters.

At the end of the main hall downstairs, they gaze wide-eyed at a rock from the moon. On a catwalk upstairs, they generate electricity with bicycle pedals and see how a simple motor works. Outside, they discover that without much friction they can move a 29-ton globe of Contithe Earth -- the Guinness World Record holder for the largest floating ball statue in the world.

The laws of science may be immutable, but the Science Museum is not. Though it may feel as unchanging as that 29-ton globe, the museum is in the midst of a period of change.

Attendance at the museum is off nearly 5 percent from 2007 to 2008, down to 247,000. The budget has been sliced, too, by more than 14 percent, to $8.8 million. Museum director and CEO Richard Conti, in the job for a little more than a year, is responding by making the museum more active in presenting its information.

The idea, he said, is to bring the science to the people.

Some patrons were coming to the building only to see movies in the IMAX theater. The space next to the theater was being used for older exhibits, timeworn pieces and those exhibits that generated little interest.

But now the museum is capitalizing on the IMAX traffic. Some of the newest and most popular exhibits are now in that expansive space next to the theater.

Running through Labor Day in that spot is an exhibit called Mindbender, which is filled with science-related puzzles, brain teasers and other fun ways to encourage critical thinking -- from a pinball maze to a spelling game to a conveyor belt where a team (such as a family) must quickly fill cafeteria trays with the appropriately shaped food items.

The Mindbender exhibit replaced a similarly successful display, Science Unplugged, in the same spot. The intentionally low-tech Science Unplugged, which encouraged children to play and learn together, was so popular that the museum decided not to have it travel to other museums as was originally planned. Instead, the exhibit was installed in the base ment, where new exhibits were formerly shown.

Conti said science museums are different from most other museums in that "our stuff doesn't get more valuable as it gets old." As a result, older exhibits have to be cycled out and new ones brought in.

Other changes are more in concept than physical location. As a way of encouraging personal interaction with the visitors, actors dressed as feuding inventors Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison may stroll out among the patrons and have an argument over the merits of their conflicting ideas. Or an actor dressed as Galileo's assistant might come out to talk about working with Galileo.

In the middle of the 205,000-square-foot building is the Demonstration Stage, on which museum volunteers may blow up things or engage in other eye-catching displays of science. On a recent visit, a volunteer was explaining inertia and Sir Isaac Newton's Laws of Motion.

At 11 a.m. today, the Demonstration Stage will be the home of the Rat Basketball League, in which four rats representing the Final Four teams in the NCAA tournament will play each other to predict a winner. In last year's tournament, the rat representing Kansas upset the rat representing Memphis. In the real NCAA tournament last year, the team from Kansas University upset the team from the University of Memphis.

Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. will be Mindbender Day, when patrons can learn a magic-card trick, learn how a bucket keeps refilling itself, design puzzles and play strategy games.

All of this change takes planning, which is where a recent philanthropic gift comes in. Barbara Thalhimer, a museum trustee, gave $500,000 to the museum specifically to be used to pay for planning and a future capital campaign. The gift was particularly welcome, Conti said, because donors often overlook the need for planning.

The state-owned museum is housed in the former Broad Street Station, and Conti said he has plans to take more advantage of the location. Train cars on the extant rails outside are used both for educational purposes (one car houses an exhibit on China) and for parties -- the museum is host to nearly 500 events a year, though most of these are not in the train cars.

Also outside is an all-aluminum submarine ("Everyone should have one," Conti joked) and New Energy Virginia, a timely exhibit exploring alternative energy sources.

"We have to be about things that people want to know about," Conti said. So the New Energy Virginia exhibit shows how energy can be derived from photovoltaic cells, a windmill and even bicycle power.

The museum may have these devices for purposes of demonstration and scientific explanation, but there is an additional benefit. Though the amount of energy they create is relatively small, it gets put into the city's electrical grid, and the museum receives a credit for it on its power bill.

Contact Daniel Neman at (804) 649-6408 or .