GUM - Gents Universiteitsmuseum & Plantentuin

About this audio guide

This guide to GUM, the Ghent University Museum, follows the physics professor Joseph Plateau and an afternoon in eighteen twenty-nine when he looked straight into the sun for an experiment. It turns to the family members, colleagues and a photographer whose hands and lenses became part of his laboratory, and to the twisted wire frames dipped in soapy water that sit in the museum's collection. Along the way it touches on a university that promoted a professor who could no longer teach.