Nobel Museum

This weekend I was in Stockholm (again). I have been to Stockholm in all the seasons and almost seen whole of it. But this trip stands apart for one reason; this time I spent considerable time in the Nobel Museum. I wished to see it in my last visit but since that day was 10th December - the day of Nobel Prize, I wasn’t sure if the museum would be open for general public. Camera is not allowed inside the museum so all I have is outside view.



The museum is situated close to the Royal Palace in old town Gamla stan. It is housed in the famous Swedish Academy (one which awards the prize). I watched the change of guard ceremony at royal palace then opened my map to locate Nobel museum and realized that I was standing 5 feet from it. I was overwhelmed. The last time I felt this was when I saw the leaning tower of Pisa just infront of me.



The Nobel museum was opened in 2001 to commemorate the centennial Nobel Prize occasion. You can imagine the importance of education in Sweden by the fact that Swedish Academy is situated steps away from Royal Palace.



The museum is about 700 sq meters and can’t be considered a big one. It houses the detail of 758 prize winners till date. There is one room dedicated to Alfred Nobel and to me it was like sanctum sanctorum of the museum. It has details from Alfred Nobel’s life, his traveling kit, the dynamite and detonator. Incidentally the laboratory where Nobel tested dynamite resulting in huge explosion which tore down the building and killed his brother was steps away from this place. There are details of the business empire of Nobel which at one time extended to 90 countries. The museum is currently having exhibition about the life of Albert Einstein. It is there I learnt that committee was not comfortable in awarding the Nobel Prize to him. When it was finally awarded, much to Einstein’s amusement (he had in advance pledged the award money to his divorced wife) it was not for Theory of Relativity but for his experiments on 'Light'.

The most impressive thing in this room is the will of Alfred which is the reason why we have the Nobel Prize. It is hand written in Swedish with ink pen. The heading is “Testament” and I must say that Nobel had a good handwriting. He signed the will in 1895 and later died in 1897 at the age of 63. He remained unmarried. The will does not mention about prize in economics which is not actually a Nobel prize but ‘The Bank of Sweden (Sveriges Riksbank) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’ first awarded in 1969.

There are two rooms which keep showing 3 minutes movie of each Nobel Prize winner, one of the rooms are specifically for individual prize winners. When I entered the room the movie about Indian Literary prize winner Rabindranath Tagore was on. Sadly I could not see it as the guided tour started that very moment. There is also a cableway in the roof of the museum through which details of each winner comes one by one but not in any particular order. It will take 5 hours 20 minutes for all the winners to be shown.

The museum has several other things to see, such as medals, the transcript of award to Schrödinger and utensils from the legendary Nobel banquet held each year after the award ceremony. There is one café inside the museum which is called as Kafé Satir. The peculiar thing about this café is that all the chairs of the café are personally signed on the underside by the winners. I flipped few chairs and saw the famous signatures. It has also a shop to buy souvenirs. To remember this visit I bought one Nobel museum wallpaper and one miniature gyroscope symbolic of Einstein’s experiment in submarines.

Interestingly I didn’t find few answers even in the Nobel Museum. It is a known fact that Nobel started the peace prize may be due to his guilt of creating huge amount of wealth from wars which used his invention of ammunition. But there was no answer as to why he asked a Norwegian committee to decide upon the peace prize. Norway that time was under the Swedish empire. One of the controversial questions about not awarding Nobel peace prize to Father of non-violence, our Mahatma Gandhi was indeed mentioned there.

I am not a museum person but I can rank this visit as the best out of all my other museum tours.