Pictures from Singapore: The Science Museum

Singapore Science Museum was undoubtedly the most awe-inspiring and awesome place I went to while in Singapore.
Pictures from the place.

The first two pictures are from the 'math-room'. There were all sorts of interesting mathematical facts chalked on the wall in the room, and a math movie was always on.

The movie in question was perhaps a children's version of Flatland. It is about a two-dimensional world where all geometrical shapes are ruled by the Circle. The Circle is the ruler because it has the greatest exterior angle(infinite). The lines lie at the bottommost of the social ladder, followed by triangles and squares, and so on. The shapes are forbidden to think about the third dimension because the very possibility that the circle is not the ultimate shape would raise doubt in the minds of figures and his dominance would be over.

A family of squares live peacefully until the young square starts imagining the forbidden dimension. I did not watch the film beyond that, but I believe the square turns into a cube and frees the people of flatland. 

The Mobius strip. Before this, I had assumed that Mobius strip existed only in theory as a sort-of mind game. It was good to see it there.

For those who don't know, the mobius strip is a three-dimensional figure with only one surface. See, if you have a ring, you have the inside of the ring and the outside of the ring, but with the mobius strip, the outside and the inside ring are one.

It is a mathematical curiosity, but also has real-life application in  making things like superconductors and molecular engines.





The best thing about the museum was that it was so interactive. In almost every exhibit, there was some way you could somehow interact with the objects on display. This was the Maths section  of the museum, and had several mathematical puzzles in it. In the picture on the right, a father-son duo try to see who solves the same puzzle faster.

The Sound exhibition was just as great as any other part of the museum, but I did not find it pleasant. There were small children running around everywhere, making the loudest and the most painful noises using the displays, and then running somewhere else to make even more noise. The entire point of the exhibition, of course, was making noises and seeing how sound works, but the cacophony did not make me appreciate the science of acoustics any better.

In the picture on the right, a girl plays with interactive table to produce interesting digital sound effects using the objects provided. This was the only exhibit I found tolerable in sounds, mostly because it did not pose the thread of driving me deaf and/or crazy.

A perpetual-machine joke. Several balls move through the machine, going up, and down, all the while moving the machine to aid their motion. It sounds like a chain reaction-- the balls move around, giving the machine energy to aid the balls' motion, which in turn powers the machine. The catch, of course, is that the machine is not at all powered by the balls but by outside sources, because-- second law of thermodynamics.

I don't have the vaguest idea what this was supposed to be, but I assume it iss something related to AVATAR. I went inside and pressed everything there was to press, pulled and pushed everything that looked remotely like a rope, and even tapped the glass really hard with my knuckles, but still got no response from it. Maybe it's a life recreation of the planet Pandora.

Ahh, yes! The virtual pond. It's actually an interactive touch screen which behaves like a real pond when touched. When you touch it, the fishes near where you touched swim away, the lips float away, and the water becomes unstable, rippling for sometime. I did not see the point of it, but it was still pretty cool.

Awesome experience! The 3D IMAX theatre. I am not ashamed to say that I found the film played hauntingly realistic, and flinched when something appeared to come towards me. It was so much better than the wimpy 3D only Alice in Wonderland that I'd watched.