Thursday, May 30, 2013
the rambling history of science museum... because history is never over.
In our short time in Belgium, whose waffles deserve a Shakespearean soliloquy, we spent time in two places. So instead of writing of really comfy seats in the observatory I will instead write of the history of science museum in Ghent. It was a quaint place whose microscopes were reminiscent of steam punk. The tour started with the father of film, I don't remember his name but, he did not create film but moving pictures that started as ocular experiments. An interesting fact is that he got his true calling by walking into a science class instead of his then major law. This ended with him having a double major. Then in the tour, skipping the electricity demonstration, we were lead to the chemistry display and again another, famous to Ghent, scientist was going to a different major, architecture, and ended up in science. Rewinding; our tour guide in the beginning of the tour disclaimed that a lot of science and or scientists, 'happened due to happy coincidences'. Which I find terribly awesome. Not all who wander are lost, sometimes they just find the path they were not looking for which is historically fascinating.
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ReplyDeleteThis is Marissa:
ReplyDeleteI thought it was pretty cool as well that two scientists found areas of study, which they became famous for, after mistakenly wandering into the wrong class. The colored and animated images that he experimented with to make "moving pictures" was pretty neat. However, I can't help but feel like he made the process so much more complicated because I feel like the idea of a flip-book is much more simplistic.
The scientist's last name was Plateau. I don't remember his first name. It interested me that moving pictures preceded photography on the scene in Ghent by 4 years because of this man's work.
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