Starship Enterprise and Crochet Coral Reef at MIT Museum

Two exhibitions opening now

Original 33 inch model of the Starship Enterprise from 1964.

I grew up adoring the original 60’s version of Star Trek. Those velour outfits were to die for, and the opening shot of the Starship Enterprise – patently a hand-made model, boldly going to who knows where – aided the formation of my consciousness. As it has done for so many people who’ve grown up to become scientists. So it is with immense joy that I can announce that next week MIT Museum opens an exhibition of my Crochet Coral Reef project alongside an exhibit of the original model of the Enterprise, which was lost for 45 years and has only been recently rediscovered.

It’s not often you get to share space with one of your heroes. Especially if the ‘hero’ is an inanimate object.

As a kid growing up in the backwaters of Brisbane – a backwater city in the backwater country of Australia – the Enterprise signified to me so much of what was missing in my life. Sure we had kangaroos grazing on the scrubby lawn, but I wanted to be Out There, in Space, in the Universe, among the stars.

Brisbane was an insular country town at the time, looked down on by the ‘sophisticates’ in Sydney and Melbourne. When we occasionally visited those meccas of literary and artistic excellence, family friends treated us like ignorant country cousins. Star Trek, with its imagined immensity, its epic ideas, and its groovy costumes, seemed the opposite of my small-scale, un-groovy existence.

I longed to wear the sci-fi frocks with the wavy little kick-skirts sported by the (very few) women of Star Trek. I’m sure my love of hyperbolic geometry now is in part inspired by those costumes. True fact: the ruffles on those dresses, like the ruffles on many crochet doilies, are hyperbolic surfaces.

Mostly, back then, I longed to go boldly to anywhere other than Brisbane.

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In Brisbane’s defense it became a birthplace of punk. (Google The Saints if you don’t believe me; they were doing it before The Sex Pistols.) Brisbane was also home to a small group of radical left-wing thinkers to which my parents belonged. Precisely because it was a red-neck hick-town in a red-neck hick-state there was something real to fight against. And thus something very real to fight for. I felt the same thing years later when I visited South Africa: There’s nothing like repression to breed serious political thinking.

Yet whatever the benefits in hindsight, growing up in Brisbane I felt I was inhabiting a cultural vacuum. At least compared to what I got to see of life elsewhere on TV. By which I mean American TV. Because there wasn’t much going on on Australian TV in the 1960’s. American TV had magic (“Bewitched” and “I Dream of Genie”), talking vehicles (“My Mother the Car”), and tropical paradises where, despite the remoteness, the women got to wear an endless parade of chic cocktail dresses (“Gilligan’s Island”). Above all, American TV had aliens.

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Apparently so did America. We used to get stories in the Australian press about people in Idaho or Texas being abducted by aliens. I can’t tell you how jealous I was. As an insomniac child I’d lie awake at night trying to will them to abduct me. I’d stare out my bedroom window hoping for a light to shine down through the night and beam me up.

Yet no one in Australia ever reported being harassed by aliens. Or having any “contact” at all. Later, in Europe, they got crop circles, which, we were told, were made by aliens. I loved the way the aliens who came America assaulted people sexually while the ones who came to Europe made art. You get the aliens you deserve, I guess.

In Australia we don’t get any aliens. It’s as if the space-people have no interest in the largest continent on Earth.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I have a theory. My theory is to do with TV. It’s often been noted how aliens first contact with humans will be via our telecommunications, starting with our radio broadcasts, then our television.¹ So, I reasoned as a kid, and I stand by it today, that what we beam out there is of cosmic cultural significance. Americans in recent years have been beaming out a great deal of violence, especially sexual violence, but in the 60’s there was a lot magic and whimsy. If I was an alien encountering early human TV, I’d have been attracted to America too. “Bewitched” alone would make a trip to Earth worthwhile.

Early British TV gave us, and the cosmos, “The Avengers” and “Doctor Who.” Emma Peel and the Daliks! Massive on both fronts. The niftiest thing offered by early Australian TV was “Skippy,” a detective-kangaroo whose special-effects efforts at ‘talking’ were beyond lame. If I was an alien, I’d have been giving Oz a miss too. So I resigned myself to a state of non-abduction.

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If I couldn’t be beamed up by actual aliens, at least on Star Trek I had TV aliens for comfort. And Mr Spock was an immense source of comfort to me as a child. He was rational and logical as opposed to the chaos of my big dysfunctional, screwed up Catholic family. I longed for the clarity and calmness Spock bought to the table. I felt if he was at our dinner table, manners might be more to the fore. I’m sure Mr Spock would have known how to stop my little brother eating with his hands and smushing ice cream into slop with his fingers. The sound of Spock’s voice alone was reassuring. Then there was his ears. More even than the velour frocks, I wanted pointy ears. To this day I dream about cosmetically altering mine to be like Spock’s. I doubt I’m the only one.

Spock’s ears are like the Enterprise: both are elegant, graphic, immediately recognizable symbols of other possibilities. Spock represents other possible versions of what a human-like being might be; the Enterprise alerts us to other possible places we humans might go.

Given its immense role in the history of television, it’s somewhat astonishing to learn that the original model of the ship was lost for 45 years. There’s a version at the Smithsonian, 11 foot long, yet the one used for filming the legendary opening sequence of the three 1960’s Star Trek series is a much smaller item, just 33 inches long. Hand-made in 1964 from wood, somehow in the 70’s this treasure got lost. It re-emerged for sale on e-Bay in 2023. Get that: someone had it in a storage unit and shoved it up on the internet. I assume they didn’t understand quite what they had.²

The good thing about the internet, however, is that nothing remains secret for long and word got out to the Roddenberry foundation who looked into its provenance and determined its veracity. So it wound up back in their hands. (Wouldn’t you love to know the final price.) In any case, the model has been lovingly restored and is about to go on show at the MIT Museum.

The exhibit opens on Wednesday (September 30, 2026), the same night as the opening party for our Crochet Coral Reef exhibition there. In my official duties for the evening I’ll be giving visitor tours of the Reef, which also represents other kinds of possibilities. Based on the hyperbolic geometry embedded in real coral organisms, the Crochet Coral Reef is, like Star Trek, an imaginary artistic enterprise aiming to offer a vision of other modalities for human social and scientific engagement. You can check out the exhibition here and our vast website here.

“Five Fathoms Deep” coral ‘painting’, created by Margaret and Christine Wertheim in conjunction with Museum Frieder Burda and 4000 people in Germany. 18ft x 10ft.

Exhibition Opening Event: September 30, 2026, 5-8pm. MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Building E28, Cambridge, MA

Crochet Coral Reef Exhibition Dates: August 2026 to February 2027

The opening night event is part of MIT’s inaugural FutureFest, a 5-day-long campus-wide celebration of science and innovation.

Many thanks to exhibition curator Ann Neumann and MIT Museum director Michael John Gorman for inviting the Reef to show at MIT. It’s a special honor for myself and my sister-reef-co-creator, Christine Wertheim, to have our artwork displayed in this epic center for science and mathematics.

1. The great Star Trek movie-spoof “Galaxy Quest” is based on this premise.

2. A similar thing happened in Italy when I was visiting there in the 1980’s. Someone found a Raphael in the attic and posted it for sale in the local newspaper listings. Wedged between entries for “vendersi” ironing board, and “vendersi” used Honda, was “vendersi” Raphaelo. In Italy, the law requites that all art items with Renaissance provenance be offered first for sale to the government for the common good, so whoever the seller was likely took a hit on a possible sale price, though it was legitimately their family heirloom.