Imagine throwing ball of meteorites into the planet and watching craters created from impact…
Imagine walking through womb following the very beginning of a human life…
Imagine feeling how the Big Bang vibrates every cell of your body…
Imagine forming tornado with your hands…
…
All that and much much more were our experiences in Universum – Science Museum in Bremen.
There were three main exhibitions in Museum – Expedition Mankind, Expedition Earth and Expedition Cosmos. Each has amazing features, certain things that we are not aware of until we learn. I do like such places. There are similar museums in UK too. The Science Museum in London is the first to advertise. This one, in Bremen, is relatively small, but no less interesting! With all those buttons to press, thingies to pull, to push, to touch, to grab, to listen, to smell, to feel, to…imagine…
I’ll just tell about few that were the highlights of Our Expedition.
Our body is the master of balance and movements, but do we really know our abilities?...I though I knew….:-) and it appears to be wrong assumption.
How about walking in the maze of a “Tactile Dom”? – Totally dark room where you supposed to find your way purely relying on your tactile senses. You can’t see a thing, you don’t know where to go, the only way to move forward – to keep hold onto the walls…and the texture of those walls are different as well…which doesn’t make it more easy…this is the World of Blind. And I must say – it is quite uncomfortable one…
The other exhibition, that I liked a lot – the discovery of the World of Perception. Basically, there were 3 main feelings exposed on display that you can “try on”. Laughter, Sorrow and Fear. Well…here we had a funny adventure, actually. Imagine suspended on a thin wire cable stone weighing 500 kilograms. And you lie down under it on a coach and through build in speakers the sinister voice like one from a chiller movie, begins to speak to you about how heavy this stone is, how dangerous it could be, if it accidentally falls down on you…and you can swing the stone a little or a lot, if you brave enough and watch it swinging above you with a little squeak , and see those really thin wires, that hold it and this is when you’ll start to feel Fear…Apart from the fact that once I lied down under that stone and prepared myself for the great experience, the voice came out of the speakers…and it was …well, in German, of course! So, now imagine – me laying there, under 500 kg of a rock, laughing madly coz I found this to be hilarious really, especially, watching confused visitors, that come closer, read the sign that tells “Fear” and watch a crazy woman laughing her ass out under a big swinging rock…well, guess, that’s too, tells us a lot about how we can be “inadequate” by absence of just one skill. (language skill in my case) Now I wonder, if there is such feeling as “fear” indeed or is it just our assumption of the situation?...
Anyway, we also played with the strings, creating different shapes of waves, we watched the process of volcano from creation to eruption, we freeze to the bones in a “cold room”, watching how you can cut ice without breaking it, we “tried” how it felt during the most famous earthquakes in a room, that shakes, letting you experience the power of the earth, we played with own shadows, making them stand still in The Room Of The Frozen Shadows….other fascinating things and discoveries…just impossible to list them all…believe me, I was feeling myself as a kid, so many things I still don’t know!
The Museum has been fantastic and we truly enjoyed it very much.