After briefly visiting the Science and Natural History museums on our first day in London, we knew it was going to be a whole-day effort to try and see it all. That effort was today. We went to the Natural History museum first, and that was suitably interesting, with lots of skeletons and stuffed animals (not of the cute and cuddly kind). You forget just how big some of these animals can get – life-size models of blue whales and dinosaurs made us feel very small. There was an interesting little section on herd animals such as elephants, deer, hogs, horses, etc that was kind of cool, and the models and skeletons of the really deep sea fish were the most captivating of the animal exhibits. There was also a room upstairs devoted to rocks, minerals and crystals, which I could have probably spent hours in. The sheer number of specimens was indescribable.
The Science Museum was predictably more colourful, noisy and hands-on. We spent a fair bit of time in the energy section, where we learnt (revised?) lots of stuff about renewable energy, electricity, etc etc. Keeley played a game that cast you as the minister for energy in the government, and you had to choose the location and type of power station to provide enough energy to the community while keeping the people on side. Predictably, she failed miserably, although we think it may have been because it was an unbeatable scenario. There was an exhibit on post-WW2 Britain and the technological advances of the time – my personal favourite was the alarm clock from the 50s or 60s that boiled a pot of tea for you after you woke up. Upstairs we saw a small setup about medical science, including an iron lung, various life support machines, x-rays, CT scanners, DNA testing machines (all that chem and biology came flooding back…), the works. As we were leaving, we noticed a surprisingly large exhibition on the history of mathematics, complete with graphing machines the size of couches, and a lot of 3D models of surfaces, Klein bottles, etc. It was all really interesting, and I could have easily spent several hours in that section alone (as it was also coupled with the history of computers). One particular 'machine' was a model of the financial system, where water is used to simulate the flow of money in a closed financial environment. Various valves were adjusted to show the flow-on effect of, say, a tax cut and how it would theoretically affect consumer spending and saving habits, in turn affecting investments, so on and so forth. I could almost hear Pat telling me how it has so many inaccuracies, but it was a very cool concept and would have been fun to play around with. Alas, by this time we had spent several solid hours in the two museums and it was time to move on. We did a few tidy-ups like getting Keeley an England badge to add to her collection and a bit of research about skiing, had a really nice Italian dinner and watched a movie on the laptop. We leave for our next hostel in the morning, so we had to pack a bit today although it wasn't as bad as in Scotland (thank God). We're thinking we overpacked (surprise, surprise) so one of our families could be receiving a package soon, if we get the guts to choose which of our 'essential' items to send home.
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