Baffled by even simple explanations
His day at the museum teaches that science makes children of us all
I know of no adult who has visited the Museum of Science in ages. I'm not talking about those riding herd on disturbing swarms of children, but adults on their own. They're out there; we just run in different circles.
Until my recent visit, I hadn't stepped into the place since Cub Scouts. This is because I enter a fugue state at the mere mention of science or mathematics. My performance in high school geometry was so bad that at the end of the year, my teacher wrote, "Sam never came close." My scientific experimentation peaked with my funky little biology exercise to find out whether ants are colorblind.
But the Museum of Science is also a tough sell for adults with all their faculties. Lazing over breakfast on a Sunday morning is one half of a couple apt to ask the other, "Want to go see the Titians at the MFA this afternoon?" or "How about we hightail it over to the Museum of Science to brush up on a Dupin cyclide?" (No one refers to the Museum of Science with the informal MOS the way we do the MFA for the Museum of Fine Arts. This speaks to an emotional distance that exists between it and us.)
One big reason the Museum of Science lacks herds of adults, one museum staff member surmised last week, is that after taking the required science courses in high school and college, most of us have little or nothing to do with the subject for the rest of our lives. Also, cowards like me correctly fear that a visit will uncover our wholesale science illiteracy. I mean, what happens when a child asks a parent about electricity? As in, what is it?
All we slothful types want out of a museum is pleasure, maybe a few head games, but never work. We look at a painting and either like it or don't. That's the beauty about art: There's no right or wrong. Not so with science, where, unfortunately, there is a right and a wrong answer for just about everything. Throw in a factoid - like Archimedes figured out on his own that a cone and a sphere would balance a cylinder - and the blood drains from our faces.
I must state before I go any further that the Museum of Science is the most extraordinary institution of its kind I know of. It reduces incomprehensible concepts to digestible explanations and draws kids in like bees to honey. My problem is that I'm baffled even by the digestible explanations.
The Observer girded his loins on a rainy day last week and entered the Museum of Science with the circumspection of ancient explorers who sailed into strange waters. Said waters were marked on maps with "There Be Dragons." My first foray was in Mathematica, the area that, as the name connotes, is all about unfathomable things mathematical. There is a fine line, I learn, between exhibits for children and for adults, and they blur all the time. With few exceptions, this is not one of them.
But make no mistake, the Museum of Science has always been geared for kids. The goal is to addict them to science and math early in the game in an attempt to offset all of us bozos with worthless degrees in the humanities. Adults were never the target audience. We were put on this planet to escort youngsters there, wipe drool, locate bathrooms, and dodge questions.
The density of the Museum of Science is overwhelming, so I use the hallucinogenic approach that has served me well over the years This involves grazing incoherently through a museum, missing most of what's there, but preserving my legs and my mind, such as it is.
I was tickled to learn in the nanotechnology section, for example, that our fingernails grow a nanometer every second. I failed to answer correctly the question posed beneath the huge model of a Tyrannosaurus rex that reads, is this model a male or a female? I was delighted with the 4.5 billion year timeline of life on earth, if only to better appreciate the herniating arguments put forth by some that the earth is 6,000 years old.
The venues where the Museum of Science has most successfully brought people of all ages together are the Charles Hayden Planetarium and the Mugar Omni Theater, with its five-story
You never know what you'll find in this place. I ran into the sister craft of the human-powered ultralight aircraft used in an MIT experiment on Crete in 1988 to see how far man could fly on his own. In an earlier incarnation, I covered the event. A Greek national bicycling champion was chosen to pedal the thing along. His goal was to make it from Crete to the island of Santorini. The guy churned like a crazed gerbil but went down yards from the Santorini shore, due to a wind gust.
The Observer started to fade by the time I hit the illusions exhibit. When I could identify only two F's in a sentence freighted with six of them, I threw in the towel. I left knowing you should not take this place too seriously. More important, I grasped the central truth of the Museum of Science: We are all children.
Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com. 
