Pablo Griffiths

Review of CosmoCaixa

As someone who has visited the London Science muse...

As someone who has visited the London Science museum often I must say that my expectations were (I thought) high. It is pretty clear soon after walking in that this was no ordinary science museum, and that my standards have been adjusted to new highs.

Set over 7 or more floors, you enter at the top (the present day) and walk (or get the lift) down through the ages, all the way back to a time when all that existed were the fundamentals of physics, and little else.
Everything is interactive, so to demonstrate centrifugal force is a sit-in experiment. To demonstrate the speed of sound is a shouting through tubes experiment (hear your own voice come back through tubes you can see suspended above you, hundreds of meters long, a couple of seconds after delivering a scream), I could go on, but there are too many to mention here.

My son, largely bored by the London Science museum (too many people, exhibits often shut, buttons don't work) spent 3 hours bouncing from activity to experiment without any need for me to encourage him (gone was the need for my verbal encouragements to keep him moving, like "why don't we see the... Or the...."). I had trouble keeping up, especially when I was being distracted by beautiful or interesting exhibits. We found only 2 out of order exhibits, and both were surrounded by other working ones ready to be used, so no biggie.

Three hours later, after only managing to see the bottom floor, we went for a bite to eat. Exhausted.



If it sounds like I am doing a sales job here it is because I genuinely think it is one of the very best family attractions in Barcelona, and somehow educational to boot!