Exhibition “Pupin – from physical to spiritual reality”
The exhibition “Pupin – from Physical to Spiritual Reality” opened at the end of September last year at the Historical Museum of Serbia. However, reality is the last thing you can expect at this exhibition because of the incredible stories from the life of the great scholar, because of the way they are presented. How much the exhibition is really amazing is the fact that the exhibition was seen by more than fifty thousand visitors, that the date of its closure has been postponed twice so far, that it might turn into a museum itself.
Once you read the title of the exhibition, “Pupin – from Physical to Spiritual Reality, it’s clear that it is an exhibition on Pupin’s life. But also about life in general. Because the principles of conduct of this great scientist, translated into the quotations that lead us through the exhibition, are in fact timeless advice for living.
“Knowledge is the golden ladder over which we climb to heaven; knowledge is the light which illuminates our path through this life and leads to a future life of everlasting glory,” it was with these words that Pupin’s mother escorted him to the world. These words are among the first guidelines in the exhibition. And as you move on through the museum, they do not stop echoing in your ears, because with each step through the exhibition you become richer and richer for new knowledge – about the museum, about Pupin, about modern science on the frontier with fiction.
Celestial swing
Modern technology has spoiled its customers, so the exhibitions no longer can be static, they have to fight for the distracted attention, to teach us and entertain us at the same time. Holograms, animations, games, lights, sound installations… These are only some of the ways for the museological experience not to be forgotten. You may have experienced something like this in some of the world’s museums, and now you have the opportunity to move through the augmented reality in Serbia.
The author of the exhibition Aleksandra Ninković Tašić provided an abundance of interesting information. However, even though the exhibition stuns you with the knowledge about Pupin that overcomes the education you get in school, the mind remains silent before the technology that almost magically takes out Pupin in front of the visitor and makes him speak. So the telephone hanged on the wall of the museum rings and you answer the phone, and on the other end of the line you hear the voice speaking, “Hello, this is Mihajlo Pupin, can you hear me?” When you answer, your words are printed on an adjacent wall. “Live View Studio” is in charge for magic this time. And there is probably no better way to repay the debt to the scientist whose work marks the foundation for the entire modern communication, but to organise an exhibition that brings to life all that on the screen.
A smart device, phone or tablet, is the main tool for wandering through the maze of the newly opened and renovated museum rooms, because as you activate the application “Pupin” and select the section in which you are – you enter Pupin’s life – you listen to the advice his mother gave him before he left to America, you sail together to New York on board of the Westlife ship, talking to him on the phone, on the celestial swing traveling through the cosmos and somewhere, at about the fifth wobble, the stars shape into Pupin’s figure that tells us about the transience of human inventions and eternal laws of the universe.
What you did not know about Pupin
On the one hand, this exhibition delights the viewer with new knowledge, while on the other, the fact how little we know about Pupin is so defeating. Everyone has heard of Pupin’s contribution to wireless telephone communication, some know him by the introduction of X-rays in medicine. But did you, for example, know that Pupin had sold everything he had to go to America, that he had arrived to New York with only five cents in his pocket, that he knew the Iliad by heart, that he was admitted to Columbia College because of that, that he cleared the skies of New York of cables when the realised that one wire could carry several telephone lines, that his coils provided telecommunications to distances so large as the Atlantic, that he was under the protection of the US government, that it was thanks to him that Banat remained part of Serbia after the First World War, that he was one of the founders of NASA, that a small crater on the Moon is named after him, that he was engaged in humanitarian work, that a large number of paintings at the National Museum are his legacy, that he was also a writer and that he won the Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography “From Immigrant to Inventor”, that to date over thirty Nobel prize winners came out of his physical laboratories at Columbia… And this will be just a small bit of information that can fit in one breath. When everything is enumerated like this, the title of the exhibition “From Physical to Spiritual Reality” becomes clear, because Pupin skilfully shaped both of these realities.
In the end of everything new that we discovered, the words of Isidor Isaac Rabi, one of Pupin’s students, get their full meaning: “With Pupin, the world was a beautiful place.” We may as well add that with Pupin, the world has remained a beautiful place to date!
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