MIT Museum—Ideas in the Making

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DURANT: I think the MIT Museum is a unique place, at least in my experience. MIT itself, of course, is a very special research institute, not like a lot of other universities. And the museum is the only real institution that MIT has to represent the whole of what it does to the rest of the world.

DOUGLAS: All museums are cultural centers. We have the culture of MIT-- what makes it special, what makes it interesting. There are no written records for most of the things that we have, just the thing itself. So we're part archaeologist, part anthropologist, part historian. And we hope to imbue those same qualities in our visitors.

DURANT: Every museum of science and technology in some sense should be a museum of ideas. Perhaps what makes this one special is that many of the ideas we deal with are ideas in the making, ideas that we're not sure about. And some of the uncertainties, some of the challenges of the research process are also present here. And so they should be.