Most guides for tourists concentrate on great art and architecture, or on the natural beauty of the landscape. Features which are of great interest and importance from a scientific point of view are often ignored or barely mentioned. This entry tries to redress the balance, and point out sights which are of great scientific interest.

The UK

Longitude and the Meridian - Greenwich, London

Jodrell Bank Observatory, Cheshire

Jodrell bank was the idea of World War II radar technician Sir Bernard Lovell. Initially it was an experiment to see if blips that occured on his radar during the war had actually come from space. In 1957 when it was completed it was the largest Radio Telescope around, however it very nearly didn't come about as funding was running out. However with the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Space Agency hastened its completion as it was the only earth based apparatus that was capable of tracking the first man made satellite. It also intercepted the first pictures from the moon in 1966 from the Soviet's Lunnik lunar lander. Today the original dish is in a state of decay under a 1970 overlay of new steel panels and Jodrell is an important contributer to NASA's SETI project alongside side the Aricebo telescope in Puerto Rico.

The Jodrell Bank visitor centre includes a set of exhibitions and a planetarium.

Fossil Reptiles - Lyme Regis, Dorset

Basalt columns - The Giant's Causeway and Fingal's Cave

The Difference Engine - The Science Museum, London

The Science Museum also has a Foucault pendulum, and a superb static steam engine powered by real steam generated somewhere in the bowels of the building. The basement is a great place, you can see all the services behind perspex walls.

The Natural History Museum - London

Kew Gardens - London

The Eden Project - Cornwall

The Eden Project in Cornwall will shortly get a proper paragraph here.

Oxford Science Museum

If in Oxford you have to visit the Oxford Science Museum, home of many of the personal collections of great British paleontologists. The galleries are supported on columns each made of a different kind of stone, polished and labelled. And at the back of the museum is the Pitt Rivers Collection, the private obsession of a man who must have been (a) incredibly interesting and (b) absolutely barking mad.

Ireland

Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland

The passage tomb of Newgrange, built in about 3200 BC, is of course of interest to archaeologists, but it also has special scientific interest, because of the alignment of the main passage in the tomb. It is designed so that the sun shines through the opening over the doorway, down the passage and lights up the central chamber as it rises on the morning of the Winter Solstice (usually around 21 December). This is one of the oldest such aligned monuments ever discovered.

The Great Telescope, Birr Castle, Co Offaly, Ireland

In the grounds of Birr Castle stands the telescope which was once the biggest in the world. Known as the Leviathan of Parsonstown, it was built by William Parsons, later the 3rd Earl of Rosse, in the 1840s. It is a Newtonian reflector, originally featuring a 72-inch polished cast metal mirror mounted in a 60-foot tube. There were in fact three removable mirrors, each weighing 3 tons, which were operated in a regular cycle, one in the telescope and two being re-polished. The tube stood between two giant walls and was supported by a wooden framework. The tube could be moved within the confines of the walls, so that any point along the meridian line of the sky (the great circle joining North to South) or for a few degrees on either side of it could be observed. The telescope was used by Parsons to make detailed observations of nebulas. He discovered the spiral structure of some nebulas. While he suspected that these were in fact galaxies outside our own, the telescope was not powerful enough to prove this by resolving individual stars - this was not proven until 1923 by Edwin Hubble.

The telescope was dismantled in 1914. One of the three mirrors was sent to the Science Museum in London, where it is still on display. Only the two walls and the tube of the telescope remained. The entire telescope was restored in 2000, with a new aluminium mirror and wooden framework. Demonstrations of the mechanism are given every day and on request.

Broom Bridge, Dublin, Ireland

The mathematician William Rowan-Hamilton had a dazzling mathematical insight when walking beside the Royal Canal on 16 October 1843. A branch of mathematics he had been working on had been giving him problems. He suddenly realised how to proceed and felt the event so significant that he went to the nearby Broom Bridge (also known as Brougham Bridge), took out his penknife and scratched a famous formula on the bridge:

i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1

The branch of Mathematics that Rowan-Hamilton had invented is known as Quaternions. It is an obscure relative of Complex Numbers, where -1 can have three different square roots. Nowadays, the study of Quaternions is seen as a bit of a dead end, but such dead ends can often be revived as working mathematics later.

A plaque was placed on the bridge in 1954, to commemorate the event, although the original inscription has long worn away. Every year on 16 October, mathematicians congregate at Dunsink Observatory and walk the few miles along the canal as far as the bridge to recreate Rowan-Hamilton's walk.

France

Foucault's Pendulum - Paris

The Prehistoric Cave Paintings of Lascaux

Located on the western edge of the "Massif-Central" mountain range in Central France, the Lascaux Caves are one of
the most important pre-historic sites yet discovered and are home to some of the best examples of stone-age cave art in the world. Experts think that the caves were used for hunting rituals and shamanistic rites. It is thought that the paintings were done over a period of 2,000 years, from 17,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago. Most of the paintings are of animals, including deer, bears, cattle, horses, and even cats. Some of the works of art are etched into the stone rather than painted. One chamber includes pictures of prehistoric men apparently hunting bison with spears.

In the 1950s, large numbers of visitors passed through the caverns, but in the 1960s, it was noticed that the paintings were starting to fade. The visitors were changing the humidity of the caverns and causing irreparable damage to the drawings. So, in 1963, the caves were closed to the general public. They are now hermetically sealed, with a computer monitoring and controlling temperature, humidity and air quality. In 1980, work was started on Lascaux II, an exact replica of the cave network, constructed using concrete and steel, embedded into the hillside. The drawings were reproduced in the finest detail and every effort was made to reproduce the atmosphere of the original caves. This centre was finally opened to the public in 1983.

For those who cannot make the visit to France to see the paintings, there is an excellent virtual tour of the caves here:Cave Tour. For anyone who wants to see original cave paintings rather than copies, the Cave of Niaux, near Tarascon-Sur-Arrieges in the Pyrénées can still be visited.

Germany

Deutsches Museum, Munich

The Deutsches Museum ¹is located on the island in the Isar river in Munich and can be reached with Munich's public transportation via the Isartor S-Bahn station and following the signs.

With about 55,000 square metres it claims to be the world's biggest museum of science and technology.² Almost any invention or discovery made by engineers, craftsmen or whoever has found a place in there.

Exhibits are either original pieces (like Gottfried Daimler's first car and Rudolf Diesel's engine, a Messerschmidt Me-262), cutaway models like aircraft turbines, or downsized models like the tunnel drilling machine which was used to dig out the tunnels for the subway system). Plus many, many basic models which you can operate in order to get an idea of the basics of electric circuits, mechanics, optics and whatever physical law you could think of.

Areas covered ... anything between sewing machines and spacecraft!

Most famous:
- The museum is very proud of its full-size replica of the Altamira Grotto,
- A must-see is the hall of bridges! There's a big hall devoted to all the means which get you across a river. There are lots of 2m models, plus video boxes, plus experiments which tell you the basic ideas of statics.

Aviation is not deeply covered in the Museum's main building but in the 'Flugwerft Schleissheim' (S-Bahn station: Oberschleissheim). This is a former local airport which has been transformed and expanded to hold aircraft of all sizes and ages (like Otto Lilienthal's experimental gliders, a DC-3 'Rosinenbomber', an F-104 Starfighter (of which the Luftwaffe lost 269 in accidents), a training section from the European Space Laboratory and some MiG fighters which were granted to the Museum after the re-unification.

The time required to see it all is somewhere around two weeks (plus a day or two for the Flugwerft Schleissheim) if your feet don't get tired too soon.

Switzerland

CERN Particle Physics Laboratory - Geneva

CERN is the European Centre for Particle Physics, an enormous complex found near the French border, close to Geneva. There may be more than 3,000 people working there at any time, with up to 7,000 scientific researchers visiting during a year. There is a permanent exhibition for visitors called 'Microcosm'. Depending on the research schedule, half-day tours visit various sections of the complex, such as the Large Hadron Collider or the Proton Synchotron.

Italy

Early anatomy theatres - Bologna and Padua

Sweden

Linnaeus Garden - Uppsala

Finland

Heurika Museum - Helsinki

Czech Republic

Clementinum - Prague

Astronomical clock - Prague