Oxford, the site of so many significant scientific discoveries, is the perfect place for a History of Science Museum. Largely ignored despite its prominent position on Broad Street next to the Sheldonian (yes, that’s the building with the heads…), the permanent displays are well worth a visit. The display cabinets chart centuries of scientific endeavour: the highly ornate instruments reminding you that science can be beautiful as well as utilitarian. Even if you’re not a scientist (perhaps especially if you’re not a scientist) you should pay this place a visit. However, this month in particular, there are two exhibitions which you should visit.
The Book of Imaginary Science is a series of sculptures by Roddy Bell. It is an exhibition concerned with ways of seeing. Alice Liddell’s Camera explores the dichotomy between reality and fantasy, self-perception and self-image. John Dee’s Angel of the Hours Clock is a beautiful and complex exploration of belief, and the desire to see the divine, the rotating contraption almost as fragile and ephemeral as the angels supposed to appear on them, ‘projected from the eye’ of a believer. All five pieces explore notions of personal identity and reality; in particular, the relationship between image and truth. The pieces are interspersed amongst the long-term residents of the museum’s collection, further blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
Small Worlds is a series of rooms through which one walks, handset of poetry pressed to one ear, each room immersing you in a new microscopic world. The wallpaper and curtains (each ushering you into a new room) are printed with pictures of diatoms with fabulous names. The wall when you enter is covered with pictures of microscopic objects, some man-made, some natural: some identifiable: some wholly alien – the stomach bones of a starfish, the curve of a fly’s cornea. The exhibition is an exploration of scale and our place in this universe: at once tiny and insignificant, and hopelessly huge and isolated from a fascinating and gorgeous microverse. ‘“The nebula’s terror when it thinks of the atom” – a line in one poem sums it all up. Prepare to feel clumsy, inept, and out of scale when you leave.
The Book of Imaginary Science runs from 25th September to 25th November
Small Worlds runs from 31st October to 6th April
Entrance is free
http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/
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And Now for Something Completely Different
