Crossroads: Getting Started

Awaken your curiosity with open-ended exploration.

Easy-to-engage perception, time, and motion exhibits allow for open-ended exploration and introduce visitors to phenomena that can be explored throughout the museum.

A Drop to Drink

Getting a drink of water would be very different if you were the size of a doll.

Where: This exhibit is not currently on view.

A Sip of Conflict

Would you, could you, will you drink from a water fountain fashioned from an actual—but unused—toilet? Porcelain is just porcelain . . . right?

Where: This exhibit is not currently on view.

Aeolian Landscape

Aeolian Landscape presents a swirling storm of sand inside a large chamber covered by a plexiglass top. A knob on the top of the exhibit rotates a sturdy fan set in the base of the chamber.

Where: Crossroads: Getting Started

Here’s an exhibit where watching is at least half the fun. You can create any number of gravity-defying illusions that will amaze you and your friends: Levitate, fly, swim though the air, grow limbs (and dissolve them), crawl straight up the wall like a lizard—the sky’s the limit.

Where: Crossroads: Getting Started

Benham's Disk

When the disk is spun, the colors you see are illusions. This effect was popularized in 1894 by toymaker C. E. Benham, who called his spinning disk an “artificial spectrum top."

Where: Crossroads: Getting Started

Bicycle Wheel Gyro

Tilt a spinning bicycle wheel while you’re sitting in a swivel chair and—surprise—you’ll start spinning in circles, too. You can also witness the same phenomenon here by hanging a spinning wheel from its axle.

Where: Crossroads: Getting Started

Braided Stream

This artwork features air bubbling up through a fine powder constrained between two glass plates tilted at a 45 degree angle. The tilting creates a continually changing landscape evocative of aerial photographs of river drainage networks on Earth and on Mars.

Where: Crossroads: Getting Started