The Cavendish Laboratory and the Birth of the Atomic Age

Explore the stories behind our new exhibition in a guided tour with Curator Dr Hannah Price. Please meet at the museum's front desk.

Free, drop-in.

 

At the Disability Friendly Opening, the museum will be open exclusively for families with children with sensory sensitivities. This event is aimed at children with special educational needs who usually find visiting museums overwhelming due to conditions that affect their sensory processing and/or have a developmental disability.

Join us for a night-time adventure at our special after-hours opening for families. We are turning our lights down very low, so bring a torch and search the museum for dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, some of whom roamed Cambridgeshire hundreds of thousands of years ago. 

Drop in to our hands-on activity stations for further investigations: discover minerals that glow in the dark under UV light and explore beautiful, colourful minerals close up, under our powerful microscopes.

Giant deer, fossil fish teeth, the rocks that built Cambridge... just some of the specimens on display that our staff can't wait to discuss with you. Beware, their enthusiasm is infectious!

Drop into our shop to reserve your free place on the tour.
 

Giant deer, fossil fish teeth, the rocks that built Cambridge... just some of the specimens on display that our staff can't wait to discuss with you. Beware, their enthusiasm is infectious!

Drop into our shop to reserve your free place on the tour.

 

Giant deer, fossil fish teeth, the rocks that built Cambridge... just some of the specimens on display that our staff can't wait to discuss with you. Beware, their enthusiasm is infectious!

Drop into our shop to reserve your free place on the tour.

Drop in to investigate tiny fossils and spectacular minerals close-up, using our powerful microscopes. Use snapshots of these minerals and fossils to make festive decorations to take home.  Get hands-on with some real fossil and rock specimens, and pop into our shop to pick up some presents.

Presenting new and recent paintings, this exhibition is Portia Zvavahera’s first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Europe. Drawing on southern African culture, Christian iconography, traditional European painting and African printmaking, this exhibition will show artworks informed by the artist’s own dreams and the spiritual traditions she grew up with as a child.

 

2024 marks 150 years since the founding of the Cavendish Laboratory of Experimental Physics. No one could have predicted in 1874 that Cambridge physics would give birth to the atomic age: that the electron and neutron would be discovered, and the atom itself split, on Free School Lane.

Giant deer, fossil fish teeth, the rocks that built Cambridge... just some of the specimens on display that our staff can't wait to discuss with you. Beware, their enthusiasm is infectious!

Drop into our shop to reserve your free place on the tour.

 

 

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