Amber and I met up with a few friends and a few of their family and friends at The American Museum of Natural History. Andrew set the timer on his shutter and got the group photo below.
I particularly enjoyed the clock pictured above. It represents Earth’s history compressed into 24 hours. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and the “day” on the clock starts with the formation of Earth. At 5:00 a.m., life begins, in the Precambrian Era. At 8:00 p.m., the first vertebrates evolve in the Paleozoic Era. At 10:00 p.m., the first dinosaurs evolve in the Mesozoic Era. Humans evolve late in the Cenozoic Era, just a fraction of a second before midnight. I imagined the Earth 65–230 million years ago as we perused the dinosaur exhibit. Lucy pointed out Tyrannosaurus’ short arms. They’re too short to reach the mouth and have only two fingers. How were they used?
The Hayden Sphere is a planetarium in the museum. It also serves as a point of reference at the center of an exhibit about scaling the universe. Here’s a listing of the scales represented in the exhibit:
Universal Scale > Galactic Scale > Stellar Scale > Planetary Scale > Human Scale > Atomic Scale
Here’s one of my favorite lines from the exhibit: “The observable universe is 100 million billion billion times bigger than a human, while humans are a million billion times larger than a proton in the nucleus of an atom.” Below is a photo of part of the exhibit in which the Hayden Sphere on the left represents the Sun and scaled models of the Solar System’s planets are to its right.
I learned that Earth orbits the Sun at an average distance of 150 million kilometers and that distance is called an “astronomical unit” and is used to measure distances within the solar system. I was entertained to see that the plaque below was placed to cover Pluto in a part of the exhibit, since the International Astronomical Union recently decided Pluto is not a planet.
In the photo below, Matt stands in the museum’s main entrance reading some of the quotes inscribed in the walls. I appreciated this quote on one of the walls about Manhood by Teddy Roosevelt.
