What's a science that you do a lot of hands on work with models and stuff?

Question

you know like when you go to a science museum and there's hands-on, interactive things? like...those things that you stand on and you spin and spin. sorry if i'm not making this very clear. but...help if you can.

i'll try to explain more: there's all these little models and things that move around each other, floating stuff, static balls, etc.

again, sorry if you're confused.

Answer 1

Don't be discouraged. Scanner is not confused. Answerer #1 gave you a pretty good answer. What you are referring to is the Applied Sciences. You get interested in (or pursue) Applied Engineering, and as you do this you will need to learn what is possible to do with your hands and be made through prototyping and manufacturing. You will have to learn different machines, various types of plastics, what they do and how they can be made. You will have to study catalogs and tools and what can be done to build your model. If you do this you will want to have an area at home where you can work on things outside of work that you don't have time to do there or want to learn about. Applied physics, applied electrical engineering and applied mechanical engineering are the disciplines. You will have to learn some from each area while you concentrate on one. You will also have to learn about safety and UL standards but that will come later. Examples of things that you will have to learn to either use or know what they can be used for: oscilloscope, calipers and micrometer, rulers, drafting tools, measuring and gauging equipment, lathes, milling machines, DVM meter, signal generator, mechanical things such as motors and relays. Hope this helped my answer is getting too long.

Answer 2

Those are probably demonstrations of concepts in physics.  But we don't play with those for a job - however, physicists do get to use a lot of cool equipment.

Answer 3

sorry, you're not being clear.  What you're describing are toys, not scientific models.  What's the difference?  The difference is that a scientific model is NOT used to entertain or inform the public.  The role of a museum is to inform, so there's nothing wrong with them having toys there, but that's not science, that's (at best) education.  A museum can also do science, but that's done in back rooms or in the basement where the public has limited or no access.

Anyway, there is a lot of engineering sciences that use models, and you have bio-mechanical science and paleontology and archeology.  They all use hand built models.  So does aeronautics and hydrodynamical research.  Biologists studing the flight of a bird or the way a fish swims (or a bacteria) also use models they build by hand.

Now days many models are computer programs that use the Laws we have established about the real world to predict the effect of changes we can not really do (melt the Arctic or remove the Moon from the sky).  So modeling covers a very broad range of different ways to approach a problem.