my name is mwd

Another place Laura and I visited last weekend was the Science Museum in London. I’d never been before, but I loved the Glasgow Science Centre when I was there last, so I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately, for a large part, I was quite disappointed with what I found.

I think perhaps my expectations were wrong – I was looking forward to the Science part of the title, whereas generally more emphasis seemed to be on the Museum aspect. There were some wonderful things to be seen, like the internals of old clocks and early mechanical calculators and so on, but no explanation on how much of it worked. I could look at various things and try and guess how they worked, but I was left with nothing else. Worse still, the explanations on some of the exhibits were lacking enough information to understand what they were supposed to do. For instance, they had Tammeter, “a device for registering the times at which a television receiver is in operation”:

It was quite interesting, and told how on some royal event way back when it was used to compare BBC and ITV ratings (ITV won most of the day, except for the coronation itself, where people preferred the BBC – I’m sure there’s something deep in that, but I digress). However, it failed to tell me if it was hooked into the television, was driven by the viewer, or some mystery third option. It felt rather incomplete as a result.

There were other devices that were great to behold, like Cooke’s Circular Dividing Machine from 1872:

It was nicely animated, but still given the explanation I was struggling to understand quite what I was looking at. In the end I just felt a bit frustrated by it all. As nice as it is to see historic devices, I had hoped to learn more about how they work than I did.

They also had some more modern interactive items, like the energy awareness section where they have lots of interactive games that were fun and interesting, but still lacked any teaching of principle. At least they were asking questions in that section.

Still, there are some good things there, and I don’t want to be totally negative about it. They had a nice glass bridge and some fun rockets, and there was lots I didn’t have time to see, so I could be doing it an incredible injustice based on a poor sample. However, I think what I was hoping for is a place that would be more a mix of the Glasgow Science Centre and the London Science Museum, rather than just a Museum that happened to contain scientific objects. Perhaps though I’m in a minority given I’m a scientist? Perhaps most people want to just observe interesting gadgets. I’m not sure – I just feel a bit guilty for having negative feelings about something that is at least trying to promote education and awareness of science.

Of course, it could just be that I was too dumb to understand :)