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Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, England
51° 45′ 15.95″ N, 1° 15′ 18.68″ W
A Hidden Oxford Treasure
Tucked away on Broad Street in the center of Oxford is an ancient science museum. Since 1683, the Museum of the History of Science has been collecting scientific knowledge and apparatus and putting it on public display. The museum’s collection covers science from antiquity to the 20th century, and from the simple (such as collections of platonic solids) to the intricate and beautiful (such as its collection of astrolabes dating back to the 9th century).
It has a collection of 15,000 items; those on display are arranged in pristine cabinets over three floors. There’s a lot to see here—you should plan to spend at least a couple of hours visiting the museum.
The museum’s iconic exhibit is a blackboard that was used by Einstein to give a lecture at Oxford in 1931 (see Figure 56-1). The blackboard shows Einstein’s calculation of the age of the universe based on its expansion; he estimated it to be 10 billion years old. (The accepted value today is somewhere between 12 and 14 billion years old.)
The museum is a stop on the Oxford Science Walk, which passes through central Oxford. (You can buy a copy of the walk booklet at the museum.) The first stop on the walk is Oxford’s Botanic Garden, which was established in 1648. It’s still going strong, and even if the weather is poor, you can spend time in the garden’s greenhouses, where it’s warm enough to grow palm trees.
The next stop is the Penicillin Memorial and Rose Garden, which commemorate the isolation and purification of penicillin at Oxford by the Australian Howard Florey and the German Ernst Chain. A few stops later, there’s a plaque on the High Street that marks the site of Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke’s laboratory, where Boyle formulated his law and Hooke built an efficient air pump.
Figure 56-1. Einstein’s blackboard; courtesy of Garrett Coakley (garrettc)
On New College Lane the walk stops at Edmond Halley’s house. Halley is best known for his comet, but he was also interested in the Earth’s magnetic field, how air pressure varies with altitude, ocean salinity, and optics. He also encouraged Newton to publish his Principia Mathematica.
The tour passes by Wadham College, where John Wilkins, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and others met to discuss natural philosophy. They later went on to form the Royal Society in London.
Another stop is the University Museum (known formally as the Oxford University Museum of Natural History), which covers geology, mineralogy, zoology, and entomology. The front lawn of the museum has an amusing set of footprints from a Megalosaurus, the bones of which were found in a quarry near Oxford.
Practical Information
Admission to the Museum of the History of Science is free, and details of its location and collection can be found at http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/. Information about the Science Walk can be found at http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/features/walk/.
