Falling apples

Today an apple falling from a tree greeted me when I opened Google. It is to commemorate Isaac Newton's birthday and coincidentally I saw an exhibit about him and his laws yesterday at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. It's a museum dedicated to the history of science and medicine and I've been meaning to visit it for ages because 1) it is named after Herman Boerhaave, as is the street I live on, and 2) it would please my inner science geek. I found it to have a really cool collection of things, contrary to the Dutch brats who were stomping through declaring it all "saai, saai, saai".

The exhibit on Newton highlighted the fact that it was 3 Leiden professors, Boerhaave included, who latched on to the importance of Newton's ideas and were key to them being noticed by others. It started a golden age in science where even the layperson wanted a microscope or other scientific instruments in their house to use as a conversation piece with guests, and people were thrilled by lectures on new discoveries in astronomy, chemistry and other sciences, presented with slides projected by a sun projector. At the end of the exhibit there was a room with various games to illustrate Newton's laws. I must say I had a few goes on the pinball machine that used two different balls to illustrate how the different materials influence how they fall around the machine (enh, I didn't notice much difference, I just love playing pinball, especially when it's free).

Aside from the current exhibit, the museum houses all sorts of cool old science tools and specimens. There are early microscopes and telescopes, as well as tools used to measure the size of the Earth. There are mechanical calculators, some of the first electron microscopes, and electricity-making machines. The medical sections were the most memorable, with many instruments including amputation saws (which weren't much different from a handsaw you can get from the hardware store), speculums, rib retractors, and catheters used in the removal of kidney stones (ow, ow, ow, and ow). The 20th century was represented with early x-ray machines and an iron lung. They also had things floating in jars, such as embryos, someone's large toe, a fetus creepily decked out in beads, and various animals, including a lizard with two tails. It was pretty eerie going through those rooms. They were dimly lit and there was some art installation going on called Soft Voices that meant there was a voice constantly reading out a poem from a room further away in a murmur loud enough to hear, but soft enough not to be able to make out the words.

Maybe I'll go back again when the next exhibit starts and have a closer look at some of the rooms I didn't look at so closely. Though there are other Leiden museums I plan to get to, such as Naturalis, De Lakenhal, the Pilgrim Museum, and I definitely need to make another visit to the Hortus Botanicus when spring comes.