Monday, May 15, 2017

Germany's Famous Science Museum

I spent last week in Munich -- my first visit to Germany in 30 years. At this point, I am supposed to insert the obligatory paragraph expressing shock and surprise at how much everything had changed. But frankly, Germany didn't seem all that different from the last time I was there. Societies have a lot more cultural inertia than we realize.

My personal high point of the trip was a visit to the famous Deutsches Museum, the top German museum of science and technology.  It's the largest science museum in the world, and a true monument to Teutonic thoroughness: why include just a few slide rules in your computing exhibit, when you can display one of every type of slide rule ever made?

The high level of the exhibits is remarkable, especially compared to U.S. science museums, which have largely been dumbed down to the level of children's museums in the course of my lifetime. The Deutsches Museum tilts heavily toward physics and engineering -- we skipped the exhibits on machine tools and metallurgy.  But I learned quite a few fun things in the course of my visit:

  • Despite the fact that the wheel was known in ancient times, the wheelbarrow was not invented in the West until the Middle Ages.
  • It's possible to slice a torus (i.e,. a donut) along a Mobius-strip-shaped cut, so that the torus gets cut all of the way through but doesn't fall into two pieces (that's really hard to explain in words, but the museum had a nice model to demonstrate).
  • Germans apparently have a much longer attention span than Americans -- all of the push buttons on the exhibits required you to hold them down much longer than would be the case for an American museum. Several times I thought an exhibit was broken, only to discover that I had not depressed the button long enough.

My favorite part of the museum was a huge (several rooms) collection of hands-on physics demonstrations -- a bigger collection than most university physics departments possess.

So how does the Deutches Museum compare to my other favorite science museum, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which I wrote about in an earlier post? (An aside: the Museum of Science and Industry was consciously modeled after Deutsches Museum).  It's an apples and oranges comparison. The Museum of Science and Industry definitely wins on the entertainment front -- it's the Disney World of science museums. But the Deutsches Museum packs in much more information, and at a much higher level. It's more like a very earnest physics textbook -- without color pictures.

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