A Science Lover’s Kind of Town

November 14, 2008|Ethan Gilsdorf

WHEN you run an ice cream parlor down the street from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you expect your customers to chat about stem cell research or trade theories about neutrinos between licks of burnt caramel. But Gus Rancatore, whose Toscanini’s shop in Cambridge, Mass., is renowned as much for its deep-thinking clientele as for its sundaes, discovered long ago that catering to the technology-minded crowd could have unforeseen advantages.

One day, two M.I.T. students who were “working in superconductors,” Mr. Rancatore said, took a good look at his ice cream machine, visible through his shop window, and were “distressed by the poor engineering.” So they took it back to their lab and transformed its inefficient gear-drive mechanism into a lean, mean, belt-driven machine. That was 23 years ago. “We still use the machine,” Mr. Rancatore said. “Another generation of M.I.T. engineers just tuned it up this summer.”

In metropolitan Boston, including Cambridge, home of Harvard and M.I.T., and the technology corridor out on Route 128, the story is amusing, but not particularly surprising. At least since the early 1700s, when its cutting-edge physicians first offered smallpox inoculations, Boston has been a leader in sciences both theoretical and applied. Today, it’s still a town for science lovers, and the mood can be either serious or playful. If you’re the kind of person whose idea of fun is probing the structure of DNA or designing a faster toy bobsled, Boston is an inspiring place to spend a few days.

An essential stop on the science circuit is the MIT Museum, on Massachusetts Avenue a block or so from M.I.T.’s nuclear reactor. Recently expanded to 15,000 square feet of floor space (a 5,000-square-foot addition opened just over a year ago), the museum features invitingly devised rotating exhibits on new M.I.T. research, as well as permanent exhibits.

One day last month, some visitors examined prototype parts for stackable urban cars, which looked more like shopping carts than vehicles, while others walked slowly backward at the “Eight Einsteins” exhibit. As they moved, “hybrid illusions” of faces of Einstein morphed into Freud, Madonna and John Lennon before their eyes. Created by Aude Oliva, a cognitive science professor, and her colleagues, the images are helping researchers learn more about visual cognition and how the brain functions.