Munich–January 27, 2017

I spent most of the day at the Deutsches Museum, a very large museum of science and technology.

This is an old clock that you see as soon as you get to the museum entrance.

For a science museum to start off with a quote from Genesis 1:1 seems sort of weird. This is a science museum, after all, not a religious museum!

Here are pictures from the museum sections devoted to manufacturing, ships, energy production, and aviation (in no particular order):

A cutaway of a ship. Doesn’t look like much space in there.

This is from the manufacturing section of the museum.

Possibly the most dimly lit room I’ve seen.

Cross-section of electrical cables and their protective housing.

Oh, the humanity! (This is a model of the Graf Zeppelin, not the Hindenburg.)

This is a wind turbine

Underwater exploration vehicle

“Upper management,” AKA boat anchors

One of the first ship’s chronometers

From the Music section:

 

This is a very large music box that plays both piano and drum.

Closeup of the toothed wheel in the music box

The museum has a planetarium, so I went up to the sixth floor for the noon show. It was all in German, but luckily it is designed to be understandable by children, so I was able to understand about 85% of it. Also, the fact that I know the basic facts they were talking about helped a lot. At any rate, I got these pictures from the sixth floor outside area before the show started:

Moar pictures!

From a display about the Big Bang (the start of the universe, not the TV show)

Constellation diagram in German

Old amateur radio equipment

This scale goes up to 3500 kg (about 7700 lbs).

This old clock has completely separate hour and minute hands

This is the gearing from a clock tower

Old surveying equipment...

..from the 1800s

A globe from 1622

and a closeup of part of it

Machine for drawing ellipses

Slide rules are now a museum piece

..but if you’re really old school, here’s the tool for you

Yet another museum piece: the kind of computer I first learned programming on

Views of the city and down the stairwells.

Looking down staircase from third floor

Miscellaneous:

A paper press to get water out of the paper during the paper-making process

From the ceramics section

Some pictures from the technical toys section:

These are Idema blocks, not Lego.

In the section on nanotechnology there’s a scale that measures how many nanometers your body weight deflects the platform. I “weigh” 80 nanometers.

And here’s a DNA lab suspended above the floor:

There was a hands-on physics area, with this resonance box; you can’t hear the tuning fork until you turn the box towards it and open the door to the box. This was just one of many such displays; it was by far my favorite part of the museum.