The Best Way to Visit the Liberty Science Center With Kids

Known as New Jersey's first major state science museum and having the largest IMAX Dome Theater in the United States, the Liberty Science Center is quietly tucked away in Liberty State Park, albeit a stones throw from downtown Manhattan and accessible within New Jersey via Light Rail. It will reopen to members on Labor Day weekend, Friday, Sept. 4 from 10am-4pm and to the general public Sept. 5-7, 10am-5pm.

Liberty Science Center will protect your family from coronavirus with online, advance ticketing, advance parking purchases, mandatory face masks, social distancing, hand sanitizing stations, increased disinfection, adjusted capacities, temperature checks, improved air quality, and more.

Liberty Science Center has been serving the community for over two decades providing interactive, educational fun for generations of families and children. This four floor, nearly 300,000 square foot facility appeals and caters to children and adults of all ages, be they a science aficionado, a budding botanist, a tech enthusiast, an animal-lover, or just a person looking to spend the day in one of the most entertaining, enthralling, thought-provoking museums in the NYC area.

Exhibits at the Liberty Science Center

The 1 Million Volt Tesla Coils are a pair of Tesla coils donated to the museum by magician David Blaine. Blaine donated these Tesla coils in 2012 after a 73-hour endurance stunt where he stood on top of a 22-foot high pillar at Pier 52 in Manhattan, surrounded by a system of seven Tesla coils. The coils will teach visitors about Nikola Tesla, a pioneer of electric power. 

The Energy Quest exhibit offers an opportunity to explore and harness energy from various sources, including using your very own legs by peddling on stationary bikes to try and generate enough energy to power a fan, a radio, a blender, and cool plasma globe. One of the most impressive booths is the very largely-scaled Tidal Power station, where you can open and close valves to release streams of water collected in a reservoir through a turbine to generate renewable energy. Another cool feature is the Power-Hungry Machine, where plugging in everyday items like a phone charger, a 40-inch LED TV, and cable box, reveals just how much energy and money we could save if we were only more judicious when using power-hungry gadgets at home. The results are displayed on this tall and colorful LED screen, visually relaying this information in a way that children can grasp and understand.

Another interesting exhibition is Communication, where the Language Karaoke station allows guests to choose a language and then try to speak it using a video prompt and green-screen technology. Be it in Mandarin, Italian, or Arabic, your voice and efforts are played back to you in fun and unexpected ways. The light-up brain sculpture is controlled by guests via touch screen to highlight the regions of the brain where communication signals are sent, received, and interpreted. The How You Hear station explains how your ears and brain turn air vibrations into electrical signals and sounds by speaking into a beige cone resembling a cochlear ear piece and having your voice transmitted onto a screen.