The Griffith Observatory

I was lucky enough to grow up just a short walk from the Griffith Observatory, the planetarium/museum that overlooks the sprawling Los Angeles Basin. (It is perhaps best known as a movie location in "Rebel Without A Cause".) For the last few years, the Observatory has undergone an extensive and expensive renovation. I have yet to see the re-do, but I can't wait. Edward Rothstein described the inside:

This reconstruction is most remarkable not for what has changed, but for what has stayed the same. And that is a radical approach in the world of science exhibitions.

The rotunda's ceiling holds the key. It shows not what the sky actually is but what humans once made of it, how it was observed and interpreted. Below it are eight murals, newly restored, that portray scientific advances that led to ever more subtle understandings: metallurgists, engineers and mathematicians, in busy colloquy, shape the cosmos through the millenniums. What is being portrayed is the classical human-centered universe. This is the very world that gave birth to the modern planetarium, in which the observer sits -- gazing upward, learning how to interpret what is seen -- as the universe moves around him in a sky dome that could well have been designed by Ptolemy.

What a great idea. I've often thought that science museums do a bad job of conveying the history of science. We get elaborate dioramas, uncut gems, potted summaries of natural selection, dizzying displays of the universe, and not a smidgen of history. It's as if all these profound ideas just dropped out of the clear blue sky. It's as if all these theories were instantly accepted, or will always be true. It's as if every scientific fact is an unambigious fact.

So I'm thrilled to see that my local planetarium has decided to preserve its old murals. What better way to teach kids about the scientific process than to show them how it continually changes our view of everything. After all, once upon a time we even thought Pluto was a planet.