Exploration

On Christmas my first action was to sleep in. 1) I have no money, 2) the only person I love is very far away, and 3) I don't feel any obligation to adhere to arbitrary social conventions. My second action was to go to FAO Schwartz. Just to look around. It was pretty neat, and almost completely full of people, but I think I missed some parts, because it wasn't grand. And the Big Piano was surrounded by people and was being rationed. How lame. I might go back at a less busy time to improvise on it and watch the performers.

Then I wandered into Central Park, which was surprisingly enjoyable in the winter. I absolutely love seeing the buildings contrasted with the natural setting, because I love being reminded how wonderful the city really is. This counter-intuitive comment comes from my recognition that the buildings and city support millions of people, allowing and enhancing their lives, in a way that took untold effort from an untold number of men, acting in accordance with principles of rationality and freedom. I took a video showing the buildings on all sides.



After totally getting lost in Central Park, and taking as long to find my way out as it took to get tired in the first place, it was pretty late. Apparently things are closed on Christmas?

The next day (after some more "The Art of Fiction", which is really high quality), I went to a FREE SCIENCE MUSEUM, known as the New York Hall of Science. Can it get better?? So it turns out this place was really for little kids, but there was still plenty of cool in it. They had an exhibition on "Is there life elsewhere?", which contained very contemporary concepts such as life on Europa, and extremophiles. I was also very impressed by a whole section on networks, a very important and fast-growing subject relating things like mathematics, computer science, neuroscience, and social sciences. Their diverse exhibits included: behavior of groups of animals, a kinetic sculpture that distributed stresses, a floor that dynamically projected a network between the people standing on it, a model of how power grids are redundant,

many pretty pictures of real-life and important networks,

a web of pulleys that could be manipulated with the wheels below,

and a visualizer of Conway's Game of Life!

This may be my personal favorite part of the museum. Not only is this an important and modern model in mathematics, game theory, and emergent behavior, but it's also really fun! On the computer you could input initial states, or choose from a selection of interesting ones discovered by scientists (including the Glider Gun shown here), and then hit play to see the Game resolve on the large board in front of you. I could play with this for hours.

Another really impressive exhibit for this particle physicist was a one meter square cloud chamber. This showed tracks left behind by fundamental particles in real time. This was awesome to watch because there were on the order of 100 particle tracks at any given time, and you could see distinctly different tracks for particles of different energies. Now I can say that I've seen direct evidence of the particles I've spent so much time studying. I want to go back with a bunch of lead to show that the particles can be blocked, or a radioactive thing to see a bunch of trails explode from it. Or a giant magnet to curve the electrons! How cool would that be!

I ended up staying until closing, but didn't get to see the whole museum, largely becasue an employee stated talking to me after he discovered that I am a physics major. This was okay though. It was interesting to talk to someone who worked in a Science museum, and lived in New York City.

And for the walk home, a very amusing sign.

-Alex Scott