On Labor Day at the Exploratorium, visiting artist Aeneas Wilder witnessed museum visitors toppling a sculpture he'd spent many painstaking days to create in our Seeing gallery. Earlier this summer, Aeneas carefully stacked pieces of specially measured wood, one at a time, until he'd constructed an enormous cage-like sphere. (To get a sense of its size, compare the sphere you see in the photo to the door just to its left.) For weeks, it stood steadily without the help of glue, nails, or anything else holding the pieces together.
Then, at 4 pm on September 3, as Aeneas watched, two visitors were invited to whack at the sphere. It collapsed in seconds like a pile of toothpicks.
Exhilarating. Who doesn't love to behold order collapsing into chaos?
YouTube video of sphere destruction
I watched our You Tube video of the event three times. Four times. Five times. And as I watched, it dawned on me that Aeneas' sculpture--and its destruction--is actually a great metaphor for science.Our understanding of the world and nature is, on one level, a carefully constructed sculpture of observations, experiments, and calculations that build on each other. Their collective result takes shape as knowledge.But knowledge is an evolving entity. New discoveries or experiments often force old--sometimes dearly held--ideas to give way, making space for new insights about the natural world. No matter how beautiful a theory or idea is, if we learn something new that negates it, we must be ready to let the old idea go. Our ability to remain unattached to ideas in the search for truth is what creates space for growth in our knowledge of the natural world.Though many people think of "art" and "science" as opposite ends of a spectrum, there's a surprising number of parallels between them. For example, it's no coincidence that, before constructing his sphere, Aeneas built two sculptures in our exhibition space, only to kick them both down. As the artistic process demands, he reworked and refined his approach, taking the building blocks (both literal and figurative) and the lessons learned from his first attempts, and stepping back enough to let go of certain aspects of his earlier approach.
