First coffee, and the "death by chocolate" cake
The next day, I headed back to the same complex. This time to check out the Príncipe Felipe Science Museum. This one is affordable for everyone: costs less than a tenner. The museum is quite large, though I think the one in Barcelona is still bigger. It took me three hours to barely make it through all the exhibits: about DNA, the structure of sound and musical instruments, space exploration and Mars, plus a small section on memory. I didn't really take photos, I was still sick and had no energy. The exhibits are good: very often interactive, especially the DNA one. Everything uses real-life examples to make it way more interesting. For instance, there's a game that tracks your pupils while you solve logic puzzles. There's a thing where two opponents try to drive a ball into a goal by trying to relax as much as possible and think about absolutely nothing. Interestingly, I couldn't play this game an unbelievable number of years ago when I was visiting my sister in the US and we went to the science museum in Chicago. That time, a whole floor was closed. And now, I finally got to it. I lost miserably, as expected: I constantly have thoughts swarming in my head. To think about nothing, I have to spend the whole day climbing mountains on a bike. Only after starting the second kilometer up does the mental mumbling quiet down.
At the sound exhibition, everything is interactive too. You can send 🌊 toward each other using little wooden boards on a string. Create resonance using some water installation whose author I didn't remember. Whisper into amplifier antennas that operate in the audible range. At first, no one around could figure out how to make them work. I caught on later: the 📡 only work at a whisper frequency, but people were trying to speak into them with a normal voice. Unfortunately, I didn't find a partner here, everyone had already walked away. This is unlike the relaxation game from the previous post, where I made the first random guy I came across mellow out with me. There was also a metronome, a tuning fork, a theremin, an echo room with a 🎹 and 🎸 where you can play if you know how. Instruments from around the world with the option to listen to them sound in several variations. I love 🎶, and I know my way around the theory of how sound works a bit, so I was really into it.
In the section about 🧬, there's a game where you and a partner sit across from each other, but there's an opaque wall between you. One participant has a picture of an object made of cubes, parallelepipeds, spheres, and triangles, and the other has to build this object without seeing the diagram. You can't show anything, only describe it with words. The exercise is tough. I watched a 👩🤝👨 do it, and realized that in English I would have done absolutely miserably. In my native language, there might have been a chance if a person with an engineering 🧠 was sitting across from me.
There's also a ⚖️ where you can visually estimate how much 💧 is in you. Water actually gets pumped into a tube, it's funny. Then there's a thing where they ask you to walk across twitching tiles while keeping your balance. It seemed a bit basic to me. There's a small mirror maze, trippy.
There's less interactivity in the space section, but that makes sense. There's a half-globe where you can flood Mars with digital water and see what it would look like at different sea levels. Mars is home to the highest 🌋 in the solar system. Olympus Mons, almost 22 km high. The mountain is so tall and gradual that we probably wouldn't grasp its scale standing next to it. It would just block the entire field of vision rather than stand out from the terrain. But if you pour water on the half-globe, it's just right. Props to the creators.
With such a wonderful museum, it's way easier to get kids interested in science, or at least spark a little curiosity. 💯 recommend.
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