Masks and vaccinations are recommended. Plan your visit
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: Crossroads: Getting Started
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.
Anti-Gravity Mirror
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
Café Wall Illusion
These tiles aren't really crooked–they just look that way.
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
Cloud Chamber
Look down into the chamber and you’ll see an ongoing cascade of thin white trails appearing and disappearing. These are cosmic ray tracks, created by high-energy subatomic particles from space.
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
Color Your Judgment
Your expectations may change your experience.
Where: This exhibit is not currently on view.
Confused Sea
Air blowing over the surface of water inside a large Plexiglas hemisphere mimics the action of the wind over the ocean by generating waves. The waves slowly change and build until the entire volume of water is circulating as one wave. Viewers can adjust the speed of the air blower and influence the building of the waves.
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
Coupled Pendulums
Start one of these two pendulums swinging and soon you’ll see the other pendulum start swinging, too. Keep watching and you’ll see the two pendulums take turns, alternately swinging energetically and coming to a near standstill.
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
Pages
