Discovery Center of Idaho

RUNNING UNTIL JANUARY 9, 2011
LIGHT SHOW

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Light Show
These are just a few of the many brand new exhibits

The goal of Light Show is to challenge our visitors every day perception of light. Light Show seeks to put our visitors "inside" the path of light and allow you to manipulate and separate light into a variety of shapes and colors. The perception of light to most of us is an incomprehensible array of brightness and shadows. Most of us cannot adequately explain the principles and properties that make up light. Once again, our very creative team of exhibit designers have broken components of light down so that our visitors can interact with light and come away with a much better understanding of the principles of light.

Light Island

Light Island will keep you enthralled for quite a while. This interactive exhibit allows our visitors to bend, shape, break down and manipulate light in unlimited varieties. Like playing with building blocks, you can move lucite shapes around the large table, each having a unique effect on beams of light. Bend the light path through a variety of shaped blocks to see what will happen, or use the different shapes to show a full spectrum of colors. You are in control of a simple beam of light, and the outcomes are truly fascinating!

Colored Flame

As with the principles of chemically controlled colors in a fireworks display, Colored Flame allows you to see for yourself how different chemicals produce different colors of flame. The rubber tube on this exhibit suck liquid into a flame and the temperature breaks the liquid sample into atoms. Some of the atoms reach an excited state and give off light. the color of that light is characteristic of the element dissolved in the liquid. Can you guess what colors will be produced by the different elements?

Light Pipe

We have all heard of "Fiber Optics", but what is it exactly? And, how can the light in fiber optics act like those electric "analog" transmissions that were used for years through metal wire? Light Pipe allows you to hear the results of light transmissions that your eye cannot see. Light Pipe takes pulses of light, at different frequencies, and turns them into sound. You control the modulation of the light pulses, and then get to hear the results for yourself. Now, come on in to also learn how the light stays in that thread of fiber optic cable through whatever curved path that the cable takes!