Day 24: She Blinded Me! With Science!

Today, our last full day in Munich (and our last full day in Europe), we visited the Deutches Museum. That’s the museum that sits on the island in the river through town. It’s essentially a science and tech museum. Our AirBnB host, David Tennant, said it was a long museum. He was right. We got through only a fraction of it.

I would recommend spending at least a full 8 hours there. We only spent 4 hours, and it was not enough for all of the science.

Ellen, Jason, and I split off from the others, since we usually do. That’s our mojo.

There were exhibits of all sorts. There was a boat exhibit, where they had cut an actual sailing ship in half to show what it looked like inside.

There was a steam engine exhibit, which showed off those giant old-timey cast-iron steam engines which filled a room, created a never-before-heard amount of noise, and were as powerful as a modern lawnmower.

There was an astronomy exhibit, which I think was Ellen’s favorite. It might have been my favorite as well, I have a small past in astronomy.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the museums here in Europe seem better (and more hands-on). I noticed in the astronomy section at Deutches, they had a bunch of exhibits on things like how light splits into colors and how stars have different temperatures and brightness and on Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams. But they order the exhibits so that it’s natural to walk through them in that order - where you learn about the concepts in the same order that humanity did (H-R diagrams make no sense if you don’t know much about star color or size. They sort the stars into classes based on their color and size). Maybe I just don’t visit enough museums in the U.S., or just haven’t noticed it until now.

The exhibits are arranged in a way to actually effectively teach you a rough outline of astronomy, and they aren’t arranged randomly with one of the exhibits being “history of astronomy.” Granted, just because they’re ordered in a smart way doesn’t mean that we didn’t walk through them backwards. It was slightly confusing.

After the astronomy section, we wandered down to the power line section.

Yes, there was a whole section on power lines.

To be fair, it was under the guise of electricity in general, but it was mostly filled with undersea cables and high voltage transformers.

There they also had an electricity demonstration every few hours, where they charged up some tesla coils and zapped some things. I don’t know what they were demonstrating, since they spoke in German, but it certainly seemed cool.

I also don’t know German for “cover your ears,” but I just covered my ears whenever everyone else did.

At the end of the day, the science museum was a pretty neat way to end the trip.