The other day I visited the Griffith Observatory (better pictures there) for the second time.
It’s just a wonderful place that I’d recommend visiting if you’re ever in LA. Personally, I felt like a kid as I walked through the halls and looked at the exhibits. Take, for example, the display of all 8 planets and Pluto at comparative scale to each other. I sort of knew Pluto had been “cancelled” because of its small radius, but seeing in person how it compares to Earth made it all much clearer. You can download the video and take a look — sorry, I haven’t figured out how to embed videos yet
And reading about how tiny we are on the scale of the solar system and the Milky Way blows your mind. We sort of know this, but in everyday life we always forget. The “You are here” caption against the backdrop of the Milky Way is like a cold shower.
And for those who aren’t huge fans of science, the observatory has another distinctive feature. It sits on a hill, so it offers a beautiful view of Los Angeles.
Walking around the observatory, I noticed an interesting fact. There are plenty of tourists among the visitors, but also lots of families with kids! People bring their children here, to science observatories that are packed with interesting popular-science content. Even I felt like a kid there — so what about actual children? For some reason I’m convinced that being introduced to the fascinating world around us in early childhood leaves a deep mark. Probably, out of a thousand kids who visit this observatory, hundreds will remember it for a long time. Dozens of them will get interested enough to start reading about it later. And one might become a scientist and go on developing it all further.
You can’t help but wonder — is something like this possible in Kazakhstan? Where can our kids go to see something similar? One option comes to mind in Astana — Expo. But having walked past Expo hundreds of times, I’ve never noticed people heading into the main building to look at the “energy of the future”. It seems many residents don’t even know whether you can go in and what’s there now.