Given the chance to think about mathematics just for the fun of it, most people would rather walk away–fast.
Fighting those odds, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum will open a temporary exhibit Saturday designed to make math not only fun but downright awesome.
It does so not with the latest computer-generated gadgetry and images but by bringing together three venerable exhibits already seen by tens of millions of people.
The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 7 and is free with museum admission, is simply called “3.”
Two of the exhibits were put together decades ago by the husband-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames, design geniuses most famous for their post-World War II modernistic furniture.
They made it their business to lure people to the beauties and wonders of science through dozens of museum exhibits and more than 100 short films.
Schoolchildren around the world have seen the Eameses’ late 1970s film “Powers of Ten.” Nine minutes long, it starts with a photo taken by a camera hovering 1 meter (about 3 feet) above a man taking a nap on a blanket.
Every 10 seconds, the camera pulls back 10 times farther. So the second picture, taken from 10 meters overhead, shows the man and blanket surrounded by a flat expanse of grass. At 100 meters, it is obvious the man, blanket and grass are bordered by a highway on one side and a marina on the other.
At 1,000 meters, the picture shows the man is napping on a grassy strip between Soldier Field and the lakefront. It isn’t long before the view encompasses all of Chicago, the region, several states, the planet Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy and on to a billion light years away.
The film then reverses direction, taking a microscopic journey that begins with the hand of the sleeping man and moves through a pore of his skin to a capillary, to a molecule in the capillary, and finally to the nucleus of an atom.
“You walk from the edge of the universe to the inside of a single atom,” said Eames Demetrios, grandson of the filmmakers.
Demetrios, who heads the design company his grandparents founded, was at the museum Tuesday helping to install a display featuring a continuous loop of the film. Having helped countless children understand the concept of distance and exponential growth, “Powers of Ten” has been designated by the Library of Congress as one of the most important films ever.
“You see terms like millions, billions and trillions used every day in the newspapers to describe amounts of things, but it’s hard to understand the true magnitude of numbers like that,” Demetrios said.
The other exhibit at the Nature Museum designed by the Eameses is “Mathematica.” Housed from 1961 to 1997 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, it should be familiar to generations of Chicagoans; a duplicate of the exhibit was at the Museum of Science and Industry from 1965 to 1982. That duplicate now resides permanently at the Boston Museum of Science.
The 39-year-old exhibit uses six interactive displays that demonstrate concepts in celestial mechanics, the Moebius band, probability, topology, minimal surfaces, projective geometry and multiplication.
To demonstrate the concept of minimal surfaces, for example, a machine activated by a push button lowers various geometric shapes fashioned out of wire into a pool of clear liquid soap. As they emerge, delicate shapes stretch across the wire frames.
“My grandparents believed that people learn from strong, visceral experience, and it was those sorts of experiences they tried to create in `Mathematica,'” said Demetrios.
“Minimal surfaces is a very rich and complex concept, and yet it can also be very simple and beautiful too, and this demonstration with the soap membranes can be appreciated on either or both of those levels,” he said.
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The third component of the show is “Seeing the Unseen,” a gallery of 50 split-second photographs dating to the 1930s by Harold E. Edgerton, a scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A pioneer in the use of strobe-lighting, Edgerton captured amazing high-speed events the human eye had never seen, such as a bullet tearing through a playing card, the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings, water droplets flung from a lawn sprinkler and an atomic explosion frozen at a millionth of a second.