Museum of the History of Science

This is a beautiful museum with a huge amount of objects on display. Astrolobes, microscopes, octants, chemical kits and much more. It’s super interesting and gorgeous!
Entry is free, they don’t have toilets or a bag check as they’re pretty small, but despite being a small museum, they have a plethora of historic artifacts on display. I’d definitely recommend popping in here.

Small museum but it’s filled with so many treasures. One of the most treasured is the chalkboard with Einstein’s original handwriting on which he explained his Theory of Relativity.
Amazing and quite mind-​boggling how advanced their research and technology was hundreds of years ago.

Small but interesting museum with a mixture of sciences exhibits. On our visit they where a couple of live experiments going on to entertain the kids & adults alike.

A museum that’s worth a quick stop if you’re in Oxford. The museum can get a little repetitive at first (there’s a lot of astrolobes and I’m still not even sure what an astrolobe is) but there are lots of really gorgeous antique microscopes as well as lots of other quirky items.

Another free museum in Oxford, this one escaped my attention because it is inconspicuous next to the Sheldonian Theatre and amid the Bodleian Library complex.
I think this museum is really neat and worth a stop. Not a long visit to see everything, but it has a lot of great implements of science, likely from the stores of Oxford itself.
Perhaps not for the easily bored, I find this neat because it is very specific. The history of the microscope and telescope, the history of biology… you get the idea. Specific and good collection, curated very well. And did I mention it is free?

This is another of Oxford’s great treasure-​filled museums that it’s so easy to miss.
The ground floor serves as an introduction to the museum and science in Oxford as a whole. It’s got a great collection of mathematical instruments, astronomical models and clocks, with lots of labels explaining how things worked and the history behind them.
The basement used to be the main laboratory for the University and it still has that great atmosphere of experiment and discovery. It’s so much nicer than big, airy modern museums with their light-​up signs and patronising information snippets. It’s still really child-​friendly — all the kids when I went loved the gory bits like the old surgeon’s tools and the demonstrations of lightning strikes.
Don’t miss: the early cameras, the first Marconiphone, the sirens, the clocks (who would have thought there were so many ways of counting time?!), the first anaesthetic kit.
There’s an upstairs as well — I’ll leave that to you to explore!

The museum is in the original building of the Ashmolean Museum, the oldest public museum in Britain. A star exhibit is the blackboard used by Einstein during has lectures at Oxford in the 1930s, to be found in the basement. The equations may be wrong, but it is a wonderful artefact. You can get a postcard or a mouse mat as a souvenir.