Notion of Motion in ExploraZone

Start date: Friday, December 1, 2006
Event is ongoing: Until Thursday, May 31, 2007

Motion pervades nature. Everything on the earth experiences motion, from people and plants to spinning tops and moving pictures. Notion of Motion, a new exhibit with interactive components, gets to the heart of motion and its centrality.

The interactive exhibit is the newest installment from the Museum’s partnership with San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Some of the exhibit’s components include:

• A Gravity Well: Roll marbles, steel balls or even coins around the Gravity Well and watch them move like planets orbiting the sun, just as Johannes Kepler predicted.

• Falling Magnets: Spin the disk and magnets move in a circular dance. Depending on how fast or slow the disk is spun, the dance changes. Why? Currents drive the magnets upward, but gravity pulls them downward – leaving them in a floating orbit.

• Pendulum Snake: Watch 10 pendula of different lengths begin swinging together, then become complex and out of phase, seemingly swinging at random. But, lo and behold, see them come back together, swinging in unison, because of the carefully calibrated length of their strings.

• Coupled Pendulum: Observe the energy of one pendulum move gradually to the other and back again in an awe-inspiring display of resonant frequency.

• Rope Squirter: See this dancing rope activated by a pulley that is attached to a spinning motor. What’s important is the string, which becomes a wild dancing loop, twisting itself and surprising visitors as they try to capture it.

• Aether Zoetrope: Find out about illusions of motion. The Zoetrope was invented in the mid 1800s, long before the development of the movie camera and animated cartoons. It was an early way to derive motion from still pictures, by turning a crank, activating a spinning cylinder and looking through slits to see an image “move.” The illusion of spinning motion comes from the inherent persistence of vision. Each image lingers in our eyes and brains long enough to merge with the next.

• Talking in Circles: Spin a large goblet and suddenly two people appear and seem to be talking. Stop it and there’s nothing there. How is it that you perceive a motion that isn’t there? Find out in Talking in Circles!

Admittance to Notion of Motion is included with regular Museum exhibit admission.