Opening Very Soon: The Mind Museum

The tail end of typhoon Mina coincided with the last exhibit testing of The Mind Museum before the facility finally opens in December 2011. I was invited to the event days ago, and being the science geek that I am, I had already decided that I would not miss it, come hell or high water.

So, wet and cold though I was when I arrived at the venue, I instantly turned chipper when I saw the talking robot that welcomed the guests. The Minds at Work 2 exhibit testing event was held at the NBC Tent at the Bonifacio Global City, and it afforded me and other kids (big and small) a peek into what the museum will offer visitors in the near future.  

If you have not already heard of The Mind Museum, you soon will. When completed, it will be the country’s newest and most modern science museum. A project of the Bonifacio Art Foundation, Inc., The Mind Museum is a ₱1 billion endeavor that relies on purely private donations.

According to curator Maribel Garcia, the museum is being built at a providential time when science is at a period of progress.

“There is an advantage to building [a science museum] now, when some museums around the world have been around for a hundred years. We can learn from their mistakes and take advantage of the [ongoing] golden age of breakthroughs, especially in neuroscience. We can incorporate what we have learned when we make our own exhibits,” she said.

 

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And The Mind Museum’s exhibits are no tawdry contraptions. As the Philippine’s first world-class science museum, it will house five modern galleries and over 250 interactive hands-on and “minds-on” activities that will present science as fun, entertaining, and engaging.

One of the best things about the museum is its edifice’s architectural design. A brainchild of architects from the architectural firm Lor Calma & Partners, the building features a part space-age, part organic look, which takes inspiration from cellular and molecular structures found in nature. If only school buildings were made this way, I’ll bet parents would have no trouble waking their children up every morning to get ready for school!


Second childhood
The Minds at Work 2 exhibit testing event featured around 30 exhibits. There were many high-tech and interesting electronic and mechanical ones, but what really caught my attention was more old-school. It was the exhibit called Mass Extinctions, a stationary scale model of a scene from the dinosaur era. But it was no ordinary diorama; it was a beautiful and dynamic rendering of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the apocalyptic period of 65 million years ago that saw the death of the ancient kings of reptiles.

A museum guide approached me and explained that the diorama was built from scratch, and the dinosaur models were made by artists and craftsmen under the guidance of paleontologists. She had to make sure that people know. In the past, others had assumed the dinosaur models were action figures bought from SM Department Store!

 

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But the diorama did not at all look like a crude simulacrum of a prehistoric landscape made from toys. In fact, it was replete with some of the hallmarks of the Cretaceous period: massive volcanic activity in the background, copses of the planet’s first flowering plants, tufts of prehistoric ferns, and even raptors with feathers—quite an accurate representation of the reptilian origins of avian species. To top it all, a massive, glowing asteroid hangs over the whole landscape, seemingly frozen in time just moments before it hit the Earth. As a lover of both scale models and prehistory, this exhibit totally made my day.

But the museum will feature other exhibits that are sure to make kids wax lyrical with delight. There is an exhibit called Creature Heads, wherein one can poke one’s head inside a giant insect’s head (in my case, a dragonfly) and see what the world looks like from the critter’s perspective. There’s also the Air exhibit, which allows one to create a miniature tornado, and the Van de Graaff sphere, which makes people’s hair stand up by transferring their bodies’ electrons to the machine. On the other hand, the Sounds of Space allows one to listen to what objects in outer space sound like, thanks to recordings from NASA and to the comfortable hemispherical audio chairs that would not look out of place in a Star Wars set. Isn’t all that amazing?

Indeed, an 11-year-old volunteer guide also thought the event was just fantastic.His mom works at The Mind Museum, so when I asked if he was there on his own volition, he answered, “yes, because the exhibits are so much fun!”

He was gung-ho about showing me how the Elliptical Pool Table exhibit worked. Placing pool balls on two marked foci on the table, he demonstrated how one ball will always hit the other no matter where you aim the first one, a phenomenon made possible by the physics behind the table’s elliptical shape.

He and I talked for a while about our favorite exhibits, and it was then that I realized that The Mind Museum really is for kids of all ages.

 

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Yes, science is fun!
The Mind Museum reminded me of the Museo Pambata in Manila. As a child, I enjoyed going to the aging museum, but as I grew more fastidious over the years, I have since wished for the Philippines to have a bigger, more modern science museum similar to the Singapore Science Centre or the Museum of Science in Boston. Thankfully, the people behind The Mind Museum took up the gauntlet to embark on the endeavor.

Curator Maribel Garcia said the story behind the museum is “nature in scale.” Thus, the organizers have conceptualized four main science galleries: The Story of the Atom, The Story of Life, The Story of the Earth, and The Story of the Universe. On top of these science galleries will be a fifth one called The Story of Technology.

In addition, the museum will also have The Hall of Philippine Science gallery, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science gallery, and a changing exhibits gallery for temporary exhibitions that will visit the museum in the future.

Some of the grander exhibits that parents and children should look forward to include the following: The Space Shell, a planetarium wherein visitors can lie down on memory foam to watch feature films or gaze at a simulated night sky; the T-Rex exhibit, a 40-foot cast of the fossil bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Stan; the Nature’s Hourglass amphitheatre, which will feature movies on natural history produced by Filipino filmmakers; and the Floating Globe exhibit—a giant model of the Earth where visitors can watch a live feed that displays the current state of the planet—from active volcanoes to typhoons, from wind currents to earthquakes.

 

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“The Mind Museum is different in that it stems from a core narrative strewn across the exhibits that science is not a cold discipline but a wondrous way of knowing, where understanding is realized as a source of profound human pleasure,” Garcia said.

Indeed, presenting science as what it really is—fun, dynamic, and comprehensible instead of boring, inert, and esoteric—will hopefully inspire more people to explore the many new doors that science could open.

“We are very clear on our mission to inspire to understand. We shall not give you a comprehensive treatise on each scientific principle but bring you at the cusp of understanding so that you would be inspired to explore more on your own in school and in your other personal explorations,” Garcia shared.

“[The Museum] will not only encourage kids to pursue the sciences but also encourage society in general to appreciate and support the sciences because it is the one discipline that has reliably moved societies forward. So, we aspire to make our audience realize that whatever it is they do, there is science in it,” she added.

Please visit http://www.themindmuseum.org/ to learn more about how you can help build The Mind Museum.