Museo Galileo

Sunday, Kristen and I spent the afternoon in the Museo Galileo, a science museum. We were not allowed to take pictures, but I did buy a guide book at the gift shop with lots of images and information if you are interested in looking at it when I get back. There's also pictures on the museum's website and the virtual museum is pretty neat.

So I mentioned that parts of Galileo were buried underneath the Chiesa di Santa Croce. Well we saw some of his other parts that are kept in the museum: 2 fingers, 1 thumb and 1 tooth.

This place was HUGE with so many scientific instruments and other cool things to look at; we spent 4 hours in there. The museum is on 2 floors, each consisting of 9 rooms (I am just pointing out a few of the things in each of the rooms that I found interesting). Note that not only were all of these instruments scientific advancements, but also extremely decorated and artistic.

Floor 1: The Medici Collections

1 - The Medici Collections

Intro to the Collection, including optical toys that showed different pictures when viewed from different angles because it was made of triangular sections.

2 - Astronomy and Time

Sun dials, astrolabes (used position of sun and stars to tell time day or night), and nocturnals (used position of some stars in the Big Dipper in relation to the North Star to tell time at night).

3 & 4 - The Representation of the World

Armillary spheres and terrestrial and celestial globes. The globes were made of wood and paper mache in the center, then smoothed out and the paper maps placed on top and covered with plaster. They were generally made in pairs.
5 - The Science of Navigation

Compasses, nautical hemispheres and astronomic calculators to calulate diverse things like the time of tides in different places or longitude.
6 - The Science of Warfare

Distantiometer to do perspective drawings, military compasses and geometry instruments.
7 - Galileo's New World

My favorite room. Different instruments illustrating physical properties, such as the parabolic trajectory of projectiles, that a body takes shorter falling along the arc of a circumference than the chord (even though the chord is shorter), and a pendulum clock that sustains itself longer.
8 - The Accademia del Cimento: Art and Science of Experimentation

Thermometers, barometers, and other instruments made from glass that looked like centerpieces.
9 - After Galileo: Exploring the Physical and Biological World

Lenses, models of the eye, and perfections to Galileo's telescope.

Floor 2: The Lorraine Collections

10 - The Lorraine Collections

Intro to the Collection, including a chemistry cabinet filled with supplies to do experiments on and closed up to look like a normal cabinet/desk and clay obstetrical models.

11 - The Spectacle of Science

Instruments that showed off science: prisims, thunder houses (illustrated the danger of lightning), luminous discharge tubes (sparks!), and other electrostatic machines.

12 & 13 - Teaching and Popularizing Science

Apparatus for angles of incidence and reflection, Archimedian screw (a machine still used today, a hollow screw that when rotated draws water up), and a model of a human arm as a third-order lever.

14 - The Precision Instrument Industry

Lots of different telescopes, including some pretty large ones.

15 & 16 - Measuring Natural Phenomena

Such as atmospheric pressure, light and meterology.

17 - Chemistry and the Public Usefulness of Science

Pharmacy equiment, such as balances and a table of chemical affinities.

18 - Science in the Home

What the upper class would have in their homes: telescopes, microscopes, barometers, clocks, and pocket watches (they even had a Japanese one John!).

Kristen just remined me to tell you that the gift shop (mainly filled with a bunch of books, some souveniors, and a mechanical paradox device that naturally rolled up an incline) included a figurine of Yoda...so random.
Caitlin