It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that college students and free events are a chemically explosive combination.
To that end, hundreds of college students from all over Boston gathered Monday for the 14th annual Museum of Science College Night, a free event that featured a night of exhibits, IMAX films and live programs.
Students had free admission to the museum from 4 to 10 p.m., as long as they brought a valid college student ID. The night was sponsored by MathWorks with support from TD Bank through the TD Charitable Foundation.
The museum offered new and returning students from the Boston area far-reaching access to its exhibits, including the Theater of Electricity, the IMAX Mugar Omni Theater, 3-D films and other live scientific presentations.
The Mugar Omni Theater, which features New England's only 180-degree IMAX Dome screen, showed bird's eye views of sandy Arabian cities, mountains and deserts.
"I've been to a lot of IMAX theaters, but this is the best one by far," said Jake Moisan, a sophomore in BU's College of Engineering. "It feels like you're there."
Not only did the film fly over hidden Arabian lands, it also examined the eyelids that help camels protect themselves in sandstorms. The sounds of wind filtered the theater's massive surround sound, which uses 12,000 watts of power each show.
The always-popular lightning show, which consists of huge bolts of lightning and electro-magnetic currents produced in the building, was featured at the Theater of Electricity. The theater offers the world's largest Van de Graaff insulator , a device most famous for making people's hair stand on end.
Andy Hall, a Tufts University graduate and physics major, directed the show and said he received some energetic feedback from students.
"It's always a lot of fun on College Night and a lot more boisterous than the average night," Hall said. "I can joke around and insult college-aged kids more than I can with families."
At one point, Hall trapped himself in an enlarged metal birdcage, raised himself 15 feet off the ground and turned on the lightning storm from inside the cage. Lightning cracked against the cage, and audience members watched as Hall touched the metal and remained unharmed.
Lightning, Hall told the audience, only goes down the outside of the metal &- something that kept him perfectly safe.
Khobi Paige, a Fisher College freshman, said the lightening exhibit was her favorite of the night.
"I kept covering my ears and I thought it was just to be careful, but it actually was extremely loud," Paige said.
The museum also offered a temporary display based on mathematical concepts and optical illusions. The exhibit, Inside the Mind of M.C. Escher, showed drawings and original depictions of mind-bending theories from Escher.
Elsewhere in the museum, students explored different perspectives of the humanity in exhibits such as Mathematica, Beyond the X-Ray and Human Evolution. Various animal exhibits proved popular, too.
"If we stay long enough, we definitely want to see the 3-D shark exhibit," said Ataleigh Inhoff, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. "It sounds awesome."
The museum offered the opportunity to touch animal fur and smell the genuine aroma of birds, and the Colossal Fossil exhibit presented bones from 65-million-year-old dinosaurs, including the skeleton of a 22-foot triceratops that weighed over 2,000 pounds.
For animal lovers of a different sort, free Duck Tours were an option for touring Boston's most famous spots, including Freedom Trail favorites.
"We saw Boston from the water and that was really fun," said Nicole Connolly, a freshman in CAS. "We got to quack at people."
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