Of science in museums: A study of contemporary museology

In laboratories some facts are reified as scientific knowledge, while others are discarded; in like manner science museums help transform a public quest for information into culturally and socially acceptable ways of grasping nature, the work of scientists, and the advancement of knowledge. Following this rationalization, museums are analyzed as social laboratories where "enhanced environments" help set up correspondences between natural orders and social ones. As objects in them are detached from their natural environments and converted into signifiers of discrete elements of knowledge, ideological narratives of progress and power are configured. Usually "Big Science," the science heir to the traditions of nuclear weaponry and genetic engineering, is presented to the public as a superior kind knowledge. When exhibited as such it engages public perceptions in specific manners. It is not devoid of agency, or of specific political and cultural aims.; This cross-cultural analysis draws attention to a specific set of tools historically developed and deployed to convey notions of power and progress. An ethnographically rooted view of scientific iconography traverses institutions in the United States, Great Britain and Mexico to exemplify the dominant exhibitionary paradigms of contemporary museologic exhibitionary practices. The demarcation between science and technology, the erasure of alternate ways of knowledge and the erosion of "scientific truth" and the "ethical boundaries of science" are herein considered.