Day 22 - MIT museum

After a few wrong turns and rounds of walking in circles, Cole and I made it to the MIT museum. Kurt, the marine curator, gave us a personal tour of the museum. He showed us the first floor, which contains 7 mini exhibits on MIT innovations and research. There are some researchers who are trying to develop batteriess out of viruses! Another exhibit featured a tiny tank of copepods, and we got to turn a wheel to capture photos of slices of the tank. Then, we could zoom in on a certain area and adjust the resolution to oberve the copepods shapes.

Upstairs there were robots and robot parts that were decades old. There was another section of the museum that showed high-tech, moving art. My favorite was a violin with a feather duster sliding tenderly back and forth over it. Another contraption composed of several consecutive wheels apparently takes several billion years to turn a stone block at the end. It is meant to represent infinity.

The holograms were the best part of the museum by far. Holography may best be described as 3-D photography that appears to move as the viewer changes orientation. It reminded me of the animated photographs and portraits in Harry Potter. A hologram is constructed from the light scattered from an object.
Photo credit: http://web.mit.edu/museum/exhibitions/holography.html


Kurt then took us back into their storage rooms. He showed us map prints and lithographs from the 1700s and 1800s. The level of detail achieved by the metal reliefs from hundreds of years ago baffles me. Ship captains were able to study the maps and follow lines drawn over the ocean to navigate to their destinations. Kurt also showed us a reconstructed ROV that could contain the original body of Jason, the ROV that went down to the Titanic (Jason had a twin).


I plan to revisit the MIT museum next week to go through all of the exhibits that we skipped during the tour!