Galileo

This weekend, my dad made his first trip to Philly. Among the usual things we do when family members visit (e.g., give the 20-second tour of our small apartment, talk, take a trip around the neighborhood, eat a lot), we visited The Franklin Institute on Saturday morning to view the Galileo exhibit, which is there until Sept. 7. My dad--an engineer and a complete math and science enthusiast--was enthralled.

The exhibit included a series of amazing things, from Michelangelo's drawing tools, to 500-year old manuscripts, to one of Galileo's telescopes (there are only two that remain, and this is the first time one of them has left Italy). There were dozens of fascinating, detailed, intricately designed tools, including nautical instruments, compasses, thermometers, sundials, and all sorts of instruments for measuring everything from the days of the year to latitude and longitude to sine and cosine.

I felt an overwhelming sense of awe wandering among these pieces of history. It's nearly impossible to imagine how anything so intricate could have been constructed by hand, and how anyone was ever clever enough to come up with such amazing tools made of little more than brass or wood. They must have spent hours and hours just making these instruments, let alone figuring out how to use them. I can't imagine the persistence it must have taken to hand blow a perfect piece of glass for a thermometer, or to score the measurements on a compass with absolute precision. I can hardly contemplate getting directions or making a restaurant reservation without a computer these days, and yet people managed to map the oceans, to design buildings, and to clearly see the moons of Jupiter in the night sky with nothing more than some wood, brass, paper, and a couple pieces of glass.

We're so inundated with new things all the time that little seems like a novelty anymore. We take so much for granted. Though I try to make time now and then to invoke my awe and reverence for nature, this exhibit reminded me that there's a lot to awe about humans, too. I can't believe all that Galileo and his counterparts accomplished, all the things they were able to create, all the ways they dared to wonder. It's pretty amazing what people can do. It really, really is.