The National Science Centre, revisited without a school group

A museum you were probably taken to as a child

The National Science Centre sits behind Purana Qila in Delhi, in a building that looks like several concrete boxes stacked by somebody who was enjoying themselves.

Most people go once, on a school trip, at an age where the only exhibit that registers is the one with buttons. Going back as an adult is a different experience, and a cheap one.

The building

The heritage floor is the good floor

I did not expect this. The floor everybody remembers is the physics one with the levers and the optical illusions, but the one that held me was Heritage, which is about how things were actually made here.

Through the gateway

It is done as full size dioramas rather than objects in cases. A village laid out at eye level, people at work, tools mid use.

A village, at eye levelThe next one along

The hall

Then the objects, which are the point: how coins were struck, how cotton was spun and woven, what a workshop's tools actually looked like.

Striking coinsThe machine

Cotton and textiles

Tools

Cases, all the way down

The big pieces

There are full size reproductions dotted about, and they beat photographs of the originals, because you can stand next to them and find out how wrong your sense of the scale was.

The chariotAn elephant, in stone

Cast in metal

A cannon, because of course

The floor with the buttons

Upstairs is the part that is unapologetically for children, and I enjoyed it more than I am willing to admit in writing.

The solar system

There is a room of lasers, a room of mirrors that goes on forever, and enough neon to make everybody's photos look better than they earned.

LasersMirrors, repeating

How many of us there are nowNeon

Go, honestly

It costs almost nothing, it is a couple of hours, and it is indoors, which in a Delhi summer is its own argument.

Go for Heritage rather than the physics floor. Then do the physics floor anyway, because you are already there and there are buttons.