Devoting 200 hours in one week to painstakingly set 15,000 dominoes on end, just to knock them down in less than three minutes, might seem like a curious pastime.

Yet it's the impermanence of dominoes that attracts the Dayton man who's behind the Maryland Science Center's Domino Day, which will be held Feb. 6.

“You get in this zone where it's just you and the dominoes, and everything else is shut out,” said Scott Suko, an electrical engineer who has coordinated topples for network TV shows and commercials and taken part in world record-holding events over the past 35 years.

“It's takes a lot of effort to create something that will last a very short time, so it's not a hobby for everyone,” he said, likening the fleeting product to a Rube Goldberg contraption or an ice sculpture.

Domino toppling is also a pursuit that inserts an “A” for art into STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — to create STEAM, Suko said.

“Topples are the perfect intersection of STEM and performance art,” he said, noting that one of the principles on display at the Maryland Science Center event will be gravitational potential energy being converted to kinetic energy.

“This is a rare art form in that it involves a lot of mechanical restraints and rules,” he said.

“At the same time, it's beautiful and fun to watch.”

This year's theme is “Space,” chosen in part to take advantage of the lobby's 50-foot ceiling, Suko said.

Setup was slated to begin about a week before the event using detailed chalk diagrams on the floor.

The topple will start when a 3-foot line of 18-inch dominoes falls and causes a mallet to hit a smoke ring shooter, which will send out a large smoke ring — playfully representing the Big Bang, the theory scientists use to explain the beginning of the universe.

There will be a two-foot replica of Olympus Mons, a volcano on Mars that is believed to be the largest in the solar system, and a Mars Rover made of toy building blocks.

A rocket will be lifted 6 feet off the ground by a pulley after heavier dominoes connected to a spool of thread are toppled in a maneuver based on the principle of mechanical advantage.

Another high point will occur when falling dominoes trigger eight catapults to send candy flying into the audience.

“Mathematical calculations have to be made to a fraction of a second to pull all of this off,” Suko said.

Suko invented Domino Day for the science center, but the event is only held every 18 months or so because of the huge amount of planning and set-up time required of its all-volunteer crew.

Assisting Suko in arranging the dominoes will be a 20-person team composed of other engineers, a science teacher and several middle- and high-school students.

Suko used to organize a lot of topples and maintained his own website until his twins, Luke and Ava, came along 10 years ago and he decided to scale back the time he spent on the hobby.

He and his wife, Ann, an environmental safety and health audit manager, added son Cade to their family three years later.

Despite the somewhat random scheduling of the event — the last one was held in November 2014 — the popularity of Domino Day keeps growing. The first in 2011 drew an audience of 500. Three years later, 2,000 people turned out, and there wasn't room to accommodate everyone.

The event has been moved to the lobby of the center, located at Baltimore's Inner Harbor, so that no one is turned away. The area also has three balconies that provide a bird's-eye view of the proceedings below.

“People already line up over an hour in advance to stake out a place to watch this happen,” said Chris Cropper, the center's senior director of marketing. “It's incredibly unique and not easily replicated anywhere else.”

The irony of finding inner peace in preparing for a topple that causes explosive audience reaction isn't lost on Suko, who discovered the hobby when he was in high school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

He said there's an air of anticipation before each event that's almost tangible — and the pressure to not disappoint is real.

That's why the more elaborate twists and turns of the design often have a secondary path built into them so momentum doesn't come to a standstill until it can be restarted, he said.

Paul Nelson, an Annapolis computer programmer who has known Suko for 20 years, has been helping him prepare for Domino Day.

Consideration was given to the sequencing of the drop so spectators “can take a breath between the highs and lows,” said Nelson, who also has a degree from the Peabody Institute. He likened that planning to a musician building crescendos and decrescendos into a composition.

He also noted that “everyone likes to see things get destroyed, maybe because we don't intentionally destroy things in real life and that makes it fun to watch when it happens in a controlled way.”

Like Suko, Nelson also derives the greatest pleasure from helping design the topple.

“I almost don't even have to see the drop,” he said.

Suko said there was never more pressure to deliver than when he took part in the Around the World Domino Topple sponsored by Coca-Cola in 1986 in honor of the company's centennial.

The event began at the company's headquarters in Atlanta, where Suko was part of the American team. Once the initial topple was completed, organizers hit a switch that sent a satellite signal to launch the next one in Rio de Janeiro. Topples were launched in succession in London, Nairobi and Tokyo before the festivities ended back in Georgia.

After all these years, Suko is still gratified by audience reaction to his exhibits and the opportunity to work with students on the events, in which he hopes to involve his children as they get a little older.

“Doing this requires you to be aware of everyone around you and every possibility — including what could fall out of your pockets and whether a shoelace is untied — and to have the presence of mind to stay calm if an accident does happen,” Suko said. “Some people think it's stressful, but I find it relaxing.”

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