Chemistry and Materials

Man in a laboratory, 1949

"Wanted: Beer tester for home of the future. Steel wedding dress and cardboard chair optional. Glass bridge and plastic car a must." Check out the wild and wacky ways that materials science and chemistry is turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Special Exhibitions

Our latest in-depth exhibition asks which technologies might be best at tackling climate change. Discover how to make sense of all the solutions being offered, cut through the debates and explore one controversial suggestion – biofuels – in more detail.

 
Plasticity: 100 years of making plastics

Imagine, invent, adapt; use, reuse, recycle. An exhibition exploring the first century of plastics.

 

Galleries

Challenge of Materials gallery

Explore the world of materials, from the leading edge of scientific innovation to new insights into everyday objects. Walk on a glass bridge; see a steel wedding dress or visit the atomic disco with its giant molecular models.

 

See the apparatus that has enabled analytical chemists to check the safety of everyday things and molecular biochemists to unlock the structures of large life-giving biomolecules.

 

Events

The Rocket Show

From lift off to touch down, find out how rockets get in to space, what they do when they are up there and how they get back down again.

 
Explainer with bubbles

This 20 minute show features bubbles of all sizes going up, down, this way, that way, and all over the place… with a little help from the audience! Find out the secret Science Museum bubble recipe and you might even get the chance to step inside our famous human bubble.

 

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