The National Museum of Scotland has unveiled a new and exciting exhibition centred around a science fiction classic which delves into the science as much as the fiction.
‘Doctor Who Worlds of Wonder’ boasts many attractions from the television series over eight distinct zones. As you enter you will first see the Time Vortex Corridor, which will subsequently lead you to arguably one of the most incredible parts of the exhibition – the Tardis control room. The control room is a reconstruction of the original reconstruction of the control console used in the Doctor Who special ‘An Adventure in Space and Time,’ released in 2013.
The following rooms focused much more on the technology, props, and production. The Tardis technology room had some fascinating information displays, giving you insights into dimensional Transcendentalism, as well as wormholes and hypercubes.
Whilst time lords use hypercubes as galactic parcels to send messages across time and space with guaranteed delivery (unless a faction paradox member gets to it first). A hypercube, or tesseract, is a very real geometric concept with many interesting implications and possible uses. To conceptualize it, let us consider a line which is in one dimension, bounded by two zero dimensional dots. To escape the quite boring one dimension, we can arrange four of these identical lines perpendicular to one another to make a square. Now we are in two dimensions, bound by four one dimensional lines. To move up another dimension we can arrange six square faces again perpendicular to one and other to make a three-dimensional cube, bounded by six two dimensional sides. Now for the last step. The easiest way to picture it is to put a small cube inside a big one, and then consider the lines that go from the corners of the larger cube to the corresponding corners of the smaller cube. The shape you will get will be a tesseract in three dimensions, but this can exist in four spatial dimensions.
Continuing throughout the exhibition, there are more information panels, detailing space exploration probes released from the Huygens and Cassini spacecraft, the Hubble space telescope, the voyager program as well as Proxima Centauri.
The exhibition also investigates biological life and organic matter, as well as atmospheres and how interlinked these two fields are.
Looking further into it, the rooms are designed extraordinarily, with plenty of fascinating scientific displays, but likely what will grab your attention the most will be the incredible props and set pieces, including monsters like the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels, as well as the Tardis itself. The exhibition will be around until May, and there is a student discount – it is £10 on weekdays and £12 on weekends. Any Whovian (although if you are truly dedicated you will likely have been already), or sci-fi admirer will have a blast.
“Doctor Who’s Tardis: Police box” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0.