How this was made

In 16th-century Europe, collectors filled whole rooms with shells, skulls, star charts and strange machines. They called them Wunderkammern: chambers of wonder. Wonderlift is mine: a wonder cabinet you ride like a lift, from a single atom to the edge of the universe.

It started in primary school

I've loved science since I was a kid. What excited me most was seeing things: the planets circling the Sun, what the body looks like under the skin, how small an atom really is, why the ground under our feet shakes and volcanoes erupt. Textbooks gave me the facts. What I always wanted was a way to walk around inside them.

Some facts are true but hard to feel. The Sun is about 109 times wider than Earth. Your body is built from roughly 30 trillion cells. A picture you can spin, zoom and click through closes that gap.

One rule: real numbers, illustrated looks

1. Every number has a named source, and relative sizes are true.
2. How things work is correct: the order of steps, the direction, where it happens.
3. Colours and shapes may be illustration, but a picture never contradicts its own label.

The rule earned its place. One accuracy pass found Olympus Mons drawn three times taller than it really is. Another found the plant cell's vacuole drawn too small, even though it can fill up to 90% of the cell. Both got fixed.

Every exhibit has an i tab that shows what is real and what is illustration. The full list of sources is on the Sources page.

More than looking

Looking is where it starts. Two extras make people stay and come back.

By the numbers

6 + 1

exhibits, plus a lift that runs through all of them

31

powers of ten, from 10⁻¹⁰ m to 10²¹ m

94

objects in Quark to Cosmos, each with a source

36

sourced facts of the day

245

quiz questions, each answer with its source

16

passport stamps to collect