science on saturday

Bit of a late post really, but I had quite a busy weekend so I'm giving you the Saturday synopsis today. Since it was a day off from the Archives, I figured I'd head into the city and take in some scientific knowledge at the museums in South Kensington (fun fact: my first hostel was right next door to these museums, but I never went because I kept thinking I would go later).
I went to the Natural History museum first, and they had a pretty awesome area discussing Earth science and how its been interpreted by humans over the years, including this pretty cool statue of Atlas carrying the world,
...and this even cooler one of a Cyclops, complete with the skull of a mastodon that people are pretty sure the Cyclops myth is based on (its got a single socket for the trunk that looks like an eye socket, and it's a giant head-like thing, so you see)
and then you go into the exhibit halls through this gigantic model of the Earth, riding an escalator up into the middle.
Sadly, there was an hour-long line to see the dinosaur exhibit (seriously! I didn't bother only because the guy at the counter told me it wasn't as good as the one at the Smithsonian, and it was a really long line! I still feel bad though) but I did find this T-Rex skull sitting in the hall dedicated to the history of the world, starting with fossil bacteria and such and finishing with humans and such.
And they also had this totally sweet skull of a predatory bird, I think a Moa, which totally looks like it would kill you in a heartbeat. Birds are scary.
...except when they're a Victorian exhibit, of about 200 hummingbirds, all stuffed into one display case. There was also a totally terrifying display about bird parts, all cut off from the bird and nailed to a board - wings, heads, feet, etc. It gave me nightmares.
In the birds/extinct category, we've got these dodo remains.
And, to represent America here, the Megatherium. Totally cool.
The big dude here at the Natural History museum is Charles Darwin, they're building a huge wing dedicated to him right now and there were quite a few exhibits on him as well. And this cool statue of him. Sort of surprised me at first, but I suppose he was British and people here have never been quite as loud about the whole evolution thing.
Even cooler, to me, was this statue of Joseph Banks, who of course was the naturalist who sailed with Captain Cook, and also asked a certain William Bligh to sail to Tahiti and gather breadfruit, which ended well.
While dinosaurs might have been closed off, the Hall of Mammals was quite open, which let me check out this colossal exhibit on whales, including a full-size replica of a blue whale, with skeletons of all of them as well.
And of course, your requisite stuffed giraffes, elephants, rhinos, hippos, etc. etc.
Nearby, in an exhibit on the human body, they had a terrifying enormous giant embryo-baby thing. This picture is deceptive because of the flash; the lighting here was bright red, and the room was filled with the sound of a heart beating, taken I guess from recordings from a mother's womb. Interesting, but not a little creepy, with the flashing light and the 80x scaled baby...
I don't normally take a focus on architecture, but I was a huge fan of the building they built for this museum. Take a look at those windows; more specifically, look at those gargoyle-ish carvings. One day, when I'm super wealthy, I hope to be able to put pterosaurs under my windows.
I couldn't get a wider-frame shot than this, but the whole building is beautiful, and the animal carvings as decoration really put it over the top for me.

Still, right next door to this baby was the less-impressively exteriored Science Museum, and I thought I'd poke my head into there and see what they had to spy.
Among other pretty impressive things in their space exhibit, they had this replica of the lander used to stage the moon landings in Nevada. Looked just like the real (fake) thing!
Also, they had the original Apollo 10 capsule, which of course was used to fake flying around the Moon. A very convincing illusion, I must say.

Ah, now we're at the real stuff: Charles Babbage's Difference Engine no. 2, or at least, a working model of it built off of his original drawings of the engine he designed before he died. This of course is sort of an early computer, although since he never built it it's not really the forerunner of the modern-day computer, more sort of an early offshoot on the computer evolutionary tree. Still, quite impressive.

They were also doing a sort of competition for their 100th year of being open as a science museum, asking people to vote on the object in their collection that changed history the most: the steam engine, Stephenson's Rocket (a famous locomotive), the telegraph, the x-ray machine, the Model T, penicillin, the V2 rocket engine, the Pilot ACE computer, the DNA double helix discovery, or the Apollo 10 capsule. It's all debatable really, but as someone interested in both war and astronomy, I just had to go with the V2 rocket engine - it's really the foundation of all space travel, and from a military history perspective it completely changed the way people looked at warfare, since it represented the ability to attack masses of people from thousands of miles away with little to no warning - the foundation for the ICBM and a lot of the Cold War, and you can make a strong argument that its use greatly impacted the decision for the Allies to use the atomic bomb. Powerful stuff, although I'm sure others would have different choices...