Passport to the Universe

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When the wrecking ball clobbered the old Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, it swept away many cherished memories of childhood stargazing. What man knows of he universe has changed greatly in the last few years, however, and the Hayden’s successor will offer the public a stunningly grander view of the universe when it opens February 19.

While the old planetarium could traverse nearby planets and stars as viewed from earth, the “Passport to the Universe” show in this new “Universarium” rockets passengers on a virtual tour covering unthinkable distances. Pausing briefly for a look at the solar system, it blasts light-years away for a gaze back at the Milky Way (earth–invisible–is in there somewhere). Viewers pass nebulas and star fields, moving so far beyond any distance humans can normally comprehend that the entire galaxy in which the solar system resides shrinks to invisibility. Before returning (via a black hole, of course), travelers bump up against the edge of the observable universe.

The accomplishment of this voyage–indeed of the entire Rose Center for Earth and Space, of which it is a part–is to make the unimaginable understandable.

In the service of this goal, Architects James Stewart Polshek and Tod Schliemann, of New York’s Polshek Partnership have constructed an extraordinary work of architecture. Dominating the once-ragged northern edge of the museum, a white sphere (enclosing the planetarium) hovers mysteriously within a 120-foot cubic membrane of improbably thin and transparent glass.

The American Museum of Natural History, best known for its dinosaur exhibits and ancient but brilliantly crafted dioramas of stuffed bison and elephants, took a bold new course when it embarked on the Frederick Phineas & Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. Given such abstract subject matter, it had to become a “visualization machine,” says Ralph Appelbaum, who heads Ralph Appelbaum Associates, the chief exhibit designers. “Otherwise, it’s just matter and formulas.” Adds Neill de Grasse Tyson, the Center’s director, “Half of what we know about the universe we’ve learned since 1985. We have a lot of universe to get into this building.”

A few highlights of the 330,000 square foot addition suggest why this team effort succeeds to such a remarkable degree.

Stroll the walkway that lines the bottom of the glass cube. Curators cleverly make use of the sphere looming overhead to convey the relative size of objects many times larger and smaller than those normally visible. If the Rose Center’s 87-foot-diameter sphere is a red blood cell, for example, then the model perched on the handrail, about the size of a clenched fist, is the size of a rhinovirus. If the sun was the size of the sphere, earth would be only 10 inches across.

Images ranged along a ramp coiling underneath the sphere describe the 13 billion years of evolution since the “Big Bang,” which is thought to have originated the universe. The way the entirety of human experience is described on this continuum puts us in our rightfully infinitesimal cosmic place.

In the Hall of the Universe, exhibits on the creation of planets, the stars, and galaxies are arranged amidst the three pairs of tapering pylons that support the freestanding sphere. Here, the AstroBulletin, a multiscreen display, offers updated and late-breaking information on astrophysics, even allowing visitors to track live progress of NASA missions. In another part of the hall, a three-dimensional hologram depicts galaxies colliding.

The mounting of the Willamette Meteorite in the Hall says a great deal about the how the design and curatorial teams tease wonder out of seemingly dry subjects. One of the few actual artifacts on view, the meteorite previously had been mounted on a concrete base in a busy hallway. The museum tipped up the beat-up 15-ton ovoid to the angle at which it is presumed to have landed, and accompanied it with a vivid demonstration of the enormous damage such relatively small objects can cause.

Suddenly, this strange artifact takes on a menacing new meaning. “Before we said what it weighed,” explained Tyson. “Now we can say what it means. We can talk about how a falling meteorite can change earth’s climate or end dinosaurs on earth.”

(Continued)

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