A while ago, I was roped into handing out leaflets outside the Science Museum as apparently a lot of people gather there for the late opening session. It turned out to be true. On the last Wednesday of the month a lot of twenty and thirty somethings gather at the museum and form a very long and orderly line - it stretches back to the Natural History Museum, but there is no pushing in happening. It was odd to see a bunch of adults queuing to get into a museum. So I thought to myself I’d come back some time and check it out. I even put it on my list of things to do.
Last night, in the company of two wonderful ladies, Cathryn and Amelia, I went back to check out the museum. I arrived at South Kensington station a few minutes before 6:30, alighted there for the museums, as the cheery voice over on the tube suggests, then walked down the pedestrian tunnel underneath exhibition road, past the familiar doors of the V&A, all the way to the end, and came out at the Science Museum. I then walked back down Exhibition Road to the back on the line. The grown-ups only session begins at 6:45 and by the time we were there people must have been queuing for some time. I stood with my gloved hands in my pockets, wondering what I would actually do or see in the museum. Amelia grabbed a brochure which suggested going to the Launchpad, as we might remember it from when we were nine, and now we could go back and experience it again. Given that when I was nine I was in Sydney, I didn’t remember the hands on gallery of this museum, but I knew the concept. Amelia was excited. She remembered it. So once we progressed through the line, we headed inside, bought ourselves a glass or two of wine and made our way up through the museum to the Launchpad looking at various exhibits on the way.
We had a look at iron lungs, and skin cells, and strange mathematical polyhedra things from the 18th century that we couldn’t find out anything about. There was a stunning display of old microscopes, telescopes and other bits and piece of scientific paraphernalia. We read about open lectures during the Victorian Era and looked at models of DNA. I was struck by just how much information we humans are gathering and by how much we, as a general population, know now, or have access to, yet how little I am aware of. There is an awful lot of learning, researching and experimenting going on.
And then we got to the Launchpad and I got to pretend I was a kid and it was pretty awesome. We had way too much fun. Truly. I haven’t felt like such a child in a long time, and it was ridiculously fun.
We teamed up with strangers to move bits of grain around in the creatively named Big Machine, we got outrageously dizzy spinning round at the Rotation Station, were suitable impressed and excited when we generated some electricity and were enchanted by the patterns formed by dry ice.
The interesting fact of the evening was provided by the one actual science student/professional amongst us, Cathryn, who informed us that if you are in a room where the level of oxygen drops to 6% you will pass out in 2 breaths and be dead in 8 minutes. That was a cheery thought.
I’m glad I put a visit to the Science Museum on my list. I don’t know if I really learnt that much about science, but I had an absolutely fantastic evening, drinking wine in a plastic cup in a museum, getting ridiculously excited by simple things, and declaring I loved science.
I love science!
