What rocks can teach
To Francis Macdonald, Harvard’s vast collection of gems, minerals, and rocks constitutes more than just a pretty face. The collections, showcased in a gallery at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, have long included the showstoppers: fantastic crystalline shapes of brilliant red, orange, and blue; semiprecious gems; and even meteorites, visitors to Earth from the distant asteroid belt. But Macdonald, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, thought the venerable gallery should go beyond just “pretty,” incorporate more science, and tell more about the story of the Earth and the processes that created it. That sensibility is what drove a renovation of the Earth and Planetary Sciences gallery at the Museum of Natural History, one of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Macdonald and museum officials felt it was time to link the beauty that has always been there more closely to the story of the Earth and to the work...