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The Museum of Curiosity: Gallery
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Images from the Museum of Curiosity, 5 March. |
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Below you can see images from the third edition of the Museum of Curiosity, featuring Ronald Hutton, Frank Close and Arthur Smith. As John Lloyd explains this isn’t a place for desiccated medieval shoes or rows of moth-eaten stuffed squirrels. We don’t care whether something is old or rare or priceless or “important” or not … as long as it makes you rub your eyes, scratch your head or stroke your chin. Or, as the Museum’s curator Bill Bailey likes to put it: “The Museum Of Curiosity is a great big, hungry baby suckling on the teat of Knowledge.”
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What is nothing? Can we even discuss something that doesn’t exist? Or does this very discussion mean that “nothing” must exist? A maxim which reaches us from antiquity is that “nature abhors a vacuum”. It had been orthodoxy from Aristotle, who claimed that there could not be an empty space, until the 17th century when Evangelista Torricelli, inventor of the barometer, became the first person to create a vacuum at the top of a tube of mercury. However modern physics has resurrected the idea that a perfect vacuum cannot exist: according to the laws of quantum physics, a vacuum is filled with virtual particles that constantly come in and out of existence. Moreover, one current theory is that the universe could be one giant quantum fluctuation: in other words the whole universe could have emerged from a vacuum. Picture courtesy of no one. |
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