Barcelona, Spain

The Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família (or Expiatory Church of the Holy Family) is a church in Barcelona that has been under construction since 1882.

Antoni Gaudi spent the later half of his life designing it.

Gaudi also designed a park in Barcelona.

Where do you think this is?

It looks like an Amazon forest.

It is the Amazon forest display at the Science Museum in Barcelona.

The science museum in Barcelona is fantastic. They have put a lot of money into the exhibits, and it shows.

Upon entering the museum you go down a long spiral ramp. This is supposed to illustrate a timeline of life on earth. A great idea, except that not a lot happens for the first few billions of years, so there is nothing much to see until you walk all the way to the bottom. A creationist would probably prefer to take an elevator to the bottom! It certainly shows that this museum has a lot of money invested in it and that is true of the very good displays in it.

This display demonstrates the rotation of the earth. The pendulum swings in a constant plane, but the earth rotates underneath it. As the earth rotates, successive pegs are knocked down. This is a simple exhibit, but beautifully presented here with steel pegs and a large chrome pendulum.

This exhibit was the most significant for me. The display asks, “what is life?” and implies that the rock below is somehow related to the picture of a flower. The rock below looks organic, like fossilized flowers. Having just come from Morocco, I know that this is actually a mineral formation that has nothing to do with plant life. The text in the display does not tell the reader this and I wonder if this was deliberate. If so, then this is a very sophisticated exhibit, because it teaches that the most obvious interpretation of the evidence is not always the correct interpretation–except most viewers would not realise this.