Friday, 31-May-2024


On my last day in Stockholm, I went to the first museum that I saw when I originally opened Google Maps to look at Stockholm.

I’d actually picked my apartment because of how close it was to the Nobel Prize Museum – Maps showed the museum front and center, and it just seemed like such a cool place to center my adventures on that I didn’t think twice.

For one reason or another, though, it fell off the priority list once I was in Stockholm. It’s not like I went, and it didn’t look interesting… I mean, I think I walked past it once or twice? For some reason that I couldn’t say, it just didn’t excite me as much as the art museum, the Vasa, or the Djurgården did.

Maybe it’s that the Nobel Prize has been… tainted a bit in recent years, thanks to some high-profile Peace Price recipients taking the prize and immediately starting in on their own murdering spree… but whatever the reason, I found myself on my last morning in town having never stepped foot into the museum.

I also found myself, on my last morning in town, with almost three hours extra.

Hmm.

I took those three hours, and checked out the museum.


It was smaller than I expected, firstly – but absolutely PACKED with memorabilia and informational placards (<sigh> my favorite…). There were test sets, beakers, pens and pipes. Clothing, animatronic figures, and suitcases from refugees. Each recipient is asked to donate some interesting object, ideally connected to their prize, to the museum… and the width and breadth of donations was simply jawdropping.

I wandered, took a tour, and even heard a discussion about why the committee has declined to take away prizes after they’ve been awarded. It makes sense; it was something I’d heard before, of course, but hearing it in the museum was a nice addition to the tour – it’s a challenging situation, and hearing them address it front-and-center was appreciated.

Alongside, the history of the prize was a neat thing to learn about – I knew it was founded privately by Alfred Nobel, of course, and that the fortune that powered it was based on the invention of dynamite, but learning the details was really neat. Specifically that explosives weren’t rare at all prior to Dynamite – what Nobel invented was, instead, a way to store and detonate them safely and consistently.

Prior to Nobel, people would just kinda… set up nitroglycerine, and then it’d explode at some point. Probably vaguely when they wanted it to, even! Nobel’s detonator allowed them to trigger the explosion specifically when they wanted to – reducing the number of accidental deaths significantly. Then, Dynamite itself, allowed the Nitroglycerine to be transported safely with significantly less fear of randomly exploding in the train or carriage because you hit a bump. Which, for me at least, would be a really big advantage.

So… good museum. I’m very glad I made time for it, in the end!

As an aside, specifically to the voracious readers among my readers, I got a new book to read out of this! Klara and the Sun, written by a Nobel Literature Prize recipient, seems really interesting… and I’m definitely excited to dive into it! Mainly because it sounds neat and pertinent to the contemporary explosion of AI, but also because the Animatronic sculpture in the museum was really neat.