City of Science and Industry
I met Paris in the last weeks of 1998. It was my first solo trip in Europe, and it had gotten off on the wrong foot, spectacularly: due to visa problems, I had meant to fly to Rome and wound up having to fly to London instead. By the time I reached Paris, I was off schedule and over budget. It was a dark, cold time of year. I was a woman alone — and a young one, not very streetwise. I wanted to explore. At the same time, I wanted to huddle down into some safe, warm place. My hostel definitely did not meet this description, and I could not afford hotels, or any restaurant worthy of the name. The great museums fascinated but also frightened me. The Louvre was daunting, the d’Orsay beautiful but exhausting.
So it was in this fragile state of mind that I first visited the City of Science and Industry, and the Geode. This is a vast complex in the northern part of Paris. It was built to suit a now-obsolete vision of the future; it looks a lot like the slightly creepy utopia in a movie from 1968. There is concrete everything. Broad expanses of courtyard lead to other broad expanses. The science museum itself is enormous, several stories tall, with a central atrium.
When I was first there, in the gloomy winter, I was almost the only one in the place. When I remember that visit, I do not remember much of anything about what I saw. I suppose I must have looked at exhibits; conceivably, I went to a movie inside the dome of the Geode. But I do not remember doing either of these things. I remember a desolating solitude. I remember eerieness. I remember the absence of warmth and the absence of vividness.
It was interesting to return to the City on this trip, this time with friends and in the summer, when I had enough money to eat properly, and was warm enough. But even in that vastly improved state of mind, with everything in favor of my well-being, I couldn’t entirely like the place. It is still a complex built out of scale with human beings: it seems to be waiting to be inhabited by something else, larger, perhaps robotic.
If you go out the back of the museum, past the Geode, you will come eventually to a swath of perfectly green, perfectly smooth grass. It has been cut very short and even; even though it is the real thing, it looks fake.
Exhibits
As a museum of science, I am not sure what I think of it either.
One should qualify this. The museum has a large number of exhibits. Some of them are very worn, like the “light games” area, with prisms too scratched to refract; optical illusions so shabby that they no longer deceive; a laser display that doesn’t lase; a standing-wave generator that doesn’t stand. Others are clearly the result of recent and extensive upgrades: an exhibit on steroids, perhaps temporary but obviously well-refreshed; an exhibit on sounds and speech, with up-to-the-minute computer displays, speech synthesizers, recordings of the vocalizations of babies from different countries.
As is often the case, the newest exhibits weren’t always the cleverest. Several of the fancier computerized stations worked badly or were not very well thought out as teaching programs; several of the simplest demonstrations were also the most effective. In one, the user pushed a button to evacuate the air surrounding an alarm bell, showing how the bell becomes inaudible because sound does not travel in a vacuum. A simple concept and obviously one of the older pieces in the museum, but it makes an impression. It is still difficult to wrap one’s mind around the idea of being able to see something but not hear it at all within its empty space.
Science and Art
I also tend to think of science museums as intended for children and art museums for adults. I am not sure why this is, other than perhaps a prevailing tendency in America. Culture is too dull for the young to enjoy (goes the implication), but science produces whimsical results which may amuse the sprouts; besides, the advanced stuff is too hard even for adults. Occasionally art museums will make some effort to be child-friendly, but they still seem to address themselves primarily to the adult population, while the science museums tend to be primarily for the kiddies. Maybe this is because American science education is poor enough that they figure even adults will not be ready to handle the hard stuff. Maybe it’s because science museums tend to be more specifically designed to teach and demonstrate concepts, whereas art museums just put the material out there for you to look at. (Usually.)
The Cité bucks this trend. It is not really meant for children — or at least, not primarily. The section on mathematics has an animation in which Asterix characters demonstrate Zeno’s paradox. It also has an animation in which naked male and female figures demonstrate symmetry, then go on to explanations of group theory which I found it a genuine exercise to follow. Another exhibit challenges the visitor to guess at the dimensionality of different fractals. Tucked away in a corner is a documentary movie of mathematicians talking a little wistfully and self-consciously about the human side of their profession. It might be meant to encourage young people to consider a career in math, but there was something too adult and bittersweet about it. This was not child-stuff, intellectually or psychologically.
The exhibits on the environment and ecology were similarly ambitious, though in a different way: they relied heavily on metaphor. In a display on biomedical ethics, the viewer was encouraged to insert his hand into a rubber glove on one side in order to shake hands with a person standing on the other side. It was memorable as an image of the alliance of scientists — a clumsy and sterile alliance, one felt. I very much doubt that most children would have gotten anything from it. Other displays — a plexiglass box full of baby dolls, an abstract graph of water supplies in various countries — were equally elliptical. If anything, this area was a collection of modern art on the subject of ethics and 21st century science.
I’m not sure I disapprove, actually: science affects ethics and vice-versa. And the displays here seemed — when they weren’t making some completely banal point — to be willing to engage with that fact more than most displays in American science museums I’ve visited.
