We went to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. It's one of the oldest public museums in the world, the only older being the Louvre. The Teylers folk point out that that the Louvre may have opened a year earlier, but it wasn't excactly by choice.
Teylers is somewhat eclectic, but the main theme is 18th and 19th century science. This was a very exciting time in human history as we finally began to believe that the universe was comprehensible and that it may operate according to sets of internally consistent rules and that these rules might be ferreted out by means of the scientific method. Galileo and Newton of course set the stage for this revolution with the examples of celestial and classical mechanics, and the early advances in optics nearly a century earlier. In the 19th century the unification of the laws of optics with the laws electricity and magnetism gave impetus to the idea of a grand unified theory of everything.
Sundry Scientific stuff
Uranium glass candlestick holder
Telescopes and microscopes
A spectrometer
A table of states of polarization of light
A generator/condenser for generating huge static-electric discharge
One of the main halls
Part of the large fossil collection
Word of the day
natuurkunde physics. Natuurkunde heette natural philosophy in engels in de 19e eeuw.
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18th and 19th century science stuff looks really cool. All that shiny metal and old bones. Nobody gets it when I say science is romantic. This is definitely a museum of romantic science.
ReplyDeleteWhat's uranium glass?