An Ideal Exhibition
Posted January 27, 2010 by John Menick
Seventeenth century plan for a perpetual motion machine.
For a long time now I’ve wanted to see an exhibition devoted to discredited scientific theories. Most science museums focus on what science got right; I care more about what science got wrong. Ideally, this exhibition would include all kinds of missteps, failed experiments, and insane quackery; but most importantly, it would highlight theories scientists thought previously untouchable or unthinkable. (Lavoisier once disproved the existence of meteorites, despite the protests of witnesses.) What qualifies as a “scientific idea” is an open question, but I hope the exhibition would include Martian canals, Ptolemy’s astronomy, phrenology, hollow earth theory, and lots of alchemy.
It’s also hard to say what’s been completely disproven — Freudian unconscious? Extraterrestrial intelligence? — so I’ll leave those questions to my fictional curators who are infallible on these matters. However, if the exhibition proves impossible, and the curators resign in protest, I would gladly settle for a backup plan: a collection of alien portraits, in oils, watercolors and acrylics, painted by U.F.O. abductees. Which exhibition is less truthful, I don’t know.
