Palais de la Découverte — Attraction in Paris

As a retired scientist and teacher, I like to see how the different places I visit present science to the public. This is not so much a science museum, as an interactive experience center for visitors, that attempts to cover a wide of sciences. It is not the main science museum in Paris which is on the northern outskirts of the city. As a non-tourist oriented place, all the signage is in French, but I expected that, and that is not a part of my rating. A few of the interactive displays were novel and interesting. An unsatisfactorily large number of the interactive exhibits were posted as out of order, and others also did not work. For a few it was not clear what they were supposed to be demonstrating, or what they were actually supposed to be operated. A lot of the optics exhibits seemed out of alignment and were dirty. There were a few exhibits and displayed items with no signage, and what they were supposed to show was not clear. The static exhibit halls were mostly a miss. The astronomy hall was best of the static exhibits. The paleontology hall was mostly empty. (There is a much better museum for that in Paris.) There are numerous mini-lecture halls where demonstrations are given in a variety of sciences. They seemed well done, but if you don't understand French you won't get much out of them. I think they require group reservations, but I'm not sure. The museum has a large number of school groups that attend during the day, making it sometimes a very noisy place. There is a nice planetarium, but when I tried to attend the last one of the day I learned that an additional ticket and a reservation was required. The attendant at the door spoke English, but was singularly unwilling to explain how to get a ticket or make a reservations. Tickets could not be purchased at the door, and the planetarium ticket is not listed at the main ticket office before you enter the museum. So how this works I never figured out. You would think once someone had entered the museum, the planetarium tickets would be available at the door! The attendant had the same indifferent, uncooperative attitude that was the norm 45 years ago when I first started visiting Paris, and which for the most part is no longer the case. So despite a few interesting things, the several negatives made this one of the less interesting science museums I have visited...

I went there for a whole day during summer. It has very interesting both permanent and temporary exhibitions covering various topics of science, such as astronomy, geology, biology or chemistry.

Reservations are recommended for exhibitions which require a speaker but if you go here with one or two other people you can easily slide in within a group, even if it was shown as full on their website. That way, we were easily able to attend presentations with school groups, but make sure not to answer all the questions if you do the same thing.

The presentations are VERY entertaining for both kids and adults, and the speakers - that we encountered that day, at least - were very good. While older ones may already know about most topics, it's always a treat to see and feel shown experiments. We had adults and kids feeling static electricity, being zapped (lightly!) or even attempting to touch liquid nitrogen after being explained why and how it is safe to do so.

While I'd recommend you to bring your own food (as food here is quite expensive), the fact that your ticket grants access to the Palais for the full day is really nice as it allows you to take a break for lunch and come back right after.

Overall a fantastic experience. Highly...

Older museum in a beautiful old building. Unfortunately, most of its beauty has been blacked out and covered up. There was no Air Conditioning.

The exhibits were hit and miss. English signs were sparse or shortened versions of the French text. If you can't read French, definitely consider other options.

Also, I don't know if this was just the day we were there or what, but there were packs of 5-15 teenagers at a time wandering around the museum unaccompanied. This wouldn't really bother me if they'd been enjoying the exhibits instead of yelling, abusing the equipment, and generally giving their age group a bad name. The museum should really a consider a school group policy that requires a chaperone, even for older kids.

Overall, there are better...