Zagreb may hold an unexpected distinction: the most museums per square kilometre of any city on Earth, according to a reader who flagged the Croatian capital as a contender for the world's most niche science-themed tourist destination. Among the institutions he cited are two that sit at the intersection of science and human experience — the Museum of Broken Relationships and the Museum of Hangovers.
The Museum of Broken Relationships was founded by two former partners, film producer Olinka Vištica and sculptor Dražen Grubišić. After their own break-up, they joked about creating a museum for the personal items left behind by a relationship. A few years later, they did exactly that. Two decades on, the museum is described by the city's tourist board as the most popular museum in Zagreb, and a second permanent site now operates in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Whether it qualifies as science-themed depends on how broadly one defines psychology, but the museum's focus on emotional attachment and loss places it squarely within the behavioural sciences.
The Museum of Hangovers is a more straightforward fit. Its exhibits are built around chemistry and neurophysiology, giving visitors a hands-on sense of how alcohol affects the body and brain. Guests can attempt to cross a tilted floor while wearing goggles that simulate the experience of walking while drunk, or take the wheel of a drunk-driving simulator to see how severely alcohol impairs reaction time and coordination. The museum's approach turns a familiar social ritual into a lesson in pharmacology and sensory disruption.
These two institutions are part of a broader genre of museums devoted to failure, bad taste, and the absurd. The Museum of Failure, a touring exhibition most recently staged in Paris, collects discontinued and unpopular products such as the Apple Newton, Betamax video cassettes, and the Tesla Cybertruck. There is also a Museum of Bad Art, which at one point had a competitor called the Museum of Particularly Bad Art. The category suggests that public appetite for the odd and the instructive is not limited to traditional science centres.
The same spirit of curiosity extends into scientific publishing, where researchers have long used literary and pop-culture allusions in paper titles. A 2005 study by Neville Goodman in the BMJ searched Medline for literary and other allusions in biomedical titles between 1951 and mid-2005. Goodman found more than 1,400 Shakespeare allusions, with a strong clustering effect: about a third referred to «What's in a name» and another third to Hamlet, mostly «To be or not to be». Among the gems he identified were «Much ado about the null hypothesis» and «All that is excreted does not glister: Or why do we keep on collecting urine to measure creatinine clearance?» Goodman noted with disappointment that no obstetrical paper had been titled «Once more unto the breech». That gap was later filled by a 2015 paper, «Once More Unto the Breech: Planned vaginal delivery compared with planned Cesarean delivery».
Earlier reporting also noted that thousands of scientific papers reference Beatles song titles or lyrics in their headings, prompting readers to wonder which other artists receive similar treatment. One reader asked whether anyone had performed a comparable analysis for Frank Zappa. A search turned up little beyond species named after him, including the spider Pachygnatha zappa, so named because its markings resemble Zappa's moustache.
Nominative determinism — the idea that people gravitate toward fields that match their names — also surfaced in the reader correspondence. One example involved Benjamin Hornigold, described as the godfather of Nassau's pirates in the early 1700s, whose surname derives from an English place name. Another came from a podcast interview with a British professor of pharmacology who studies the history of drugs back to their botanical roots. His name: Rod Flower.
For travellers seeking science with an unusual twist, Zagreb's museum density offers an unexpected itinerary. The Museum of Hangovers delivers a direct lesson in neurophysiology, while the Museum of Broken Relationships explores the psychology of attachment and loss. Together they suggest that the most memorable science-themed attractions may be the ones that apply scientific thinking to the messiest parts of being human.