"Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens": Frank Oppenheimer and the birth of the modern science museum

"the whole point of the Exploratorium is for people to feel they have the capacity to understand things." --Frank Oppenheimer

I admit it: I'd never heard of Frank Oppenheimer until I received my review copy of K.C. Cole's Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up. I thought for a day or two that it was a book about Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called "Father of the Atomic Bomb," and was thus completely befuddled by the book's cheery title and its cover - a fanciful cloud of iridescent bubbles.

Of course, I was off by a sibling. Frank Oppenheimer was actually Robert's younger brother. Like Robert, Frank was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Like Robert, he was frustrated by the direction of American nuclear policy after the war. Like Robert, his associations with left-wing politics resulted in painful ostracism during the McCarthy era. But unlike his older brother, who died of cancer in 1967, Frank had a playfully redemptive, upbeat third act to his life - he created San Francisco's Exploratorium, the prototypical interactive science museum.

The Exploratorium must be one of the best-kept secrets in the country, because since moving to the East Coast, I've encountered hardly anyone who's heard of it. To say it's a science museum is a terrible understatement. It's more like Santa's workshop, if Santa were a retired physics professor. The Exploratorium is prettier and slicker today than when it first opened in 1969, but it's still fundamentally a collection of homemade, primitive gadgets that illustrate various scientific principles and invite visitors to mess around. Believing that urban and suburban communities "had become information rich but experience poor," Frank Oppenheimer wanted his museum to be "a woods of natural phenomena" in which visitors could wander freely, tinker, and develop intuitions about the world around them. He wanted people to leave the Exploratorium believing that they could, through observation and experimentation, figure anything out themselves. In one success story, an inspired visitor went home and fixed a plug on her lamp - despite there being no exhibits about wiring electronics in the museum. Scientific American editor Dennis Flanagan called the Exploratorium "the only true science museum." (For those not lucky enough to have visited, I'd recommend both this book, and Jon Else's 1982 documentary, Palace of Delights.)

There have been many attempts to bridge the gap between the experts and the laymen. The attempts have involved books, magazine articles, television programs and general science courses in schools. But such attempts, although valuable, are at a disadvantage because they lack props; they require apparatus which people can see and handle and which display phenomena which people can turn on and off and vary at will. -- Frank Oppenheimer, "Rationale for a Science Museum"

Today, in the Web 2.0 world, interactivity is expected, even demanded, in education. But in 1969, letting visitors play with, even break, the exhibits was heresy. Even enthusiastic supporters couldn't decide how to categorize (or justify funding for) the Exploratorium, a cavernous warehouse of gadgets with no rules, no guards, no teachers, and a crew of long-haired teenage "explainers". Was it a weird new kind of school or a weird new kind of museum? That it survived, that it thrived, winning international awards and inspiring the new generation of hands-on science museums we know today, is largely due to the vision of Frank Oppenheimer. First he made the bomb; then he made a playground.

Sightseeing, [Frank] liked to say, is the basis for all discovery. Marco Polo and Charles Darwin were both sightseers. "Individual sights combine to form patterns," he said, "which constitute a simple form of understanding."

K.C. Cole's book is, like the Exploratorium itself, a collection of vignettes that interact to generate a larger whole. She starts and ends with descriptions of the Exploratorium, from her own first visit as a young science writer, and from the memories of other visitors and employees. But the heart of the book is about Frank Oppenheimer, from his childhood through his death in 1985. Cole's description of his childhood, in particular, made me intensely jealous - he was indulged in all sorts of scientific and artistic enthusiasms by his wealthy parents and older brother. He climbed into rooftop water towers, ran his brother's twenty-foot sailboat aground, collected junk and rocks, and generally stripped and rebuilt everything mechanical within reach. Cole writes,

The more I found out about Frank's former life, the more clear it became that he wore his history on his sleeve not just in this, but in almost every respect: his kindness, his insatiable curiosity, his love of junk and art, his passionate distaste for dishonestly his bottomless appetite for everything the human and physical world had to offer - all were transparently tied to his previous experience. And the more I learned, the more it seemed as if everything he'd done had led inexorably (if somewhat erratically and eccentrically) to the Exploratorium.

If you are already familiar with the history of physics in the United States, this book won't tell you much you don't already know about the conflicted emotions of the Manhattan Project's physicists in the face of post-war nuclear politics. Cole doesn't delve into Oppenheimer's ill-fated association with the Communist Party (he was a member briefly, but seems to have found it frustratingly ineffectual at advocating for civil rights, so he later quit), and she doesn't go into the McCarthy hearings. Instead, she shares just enough history to convey the emotional and intellectual impact that his decade-long ostracism from academia had for Frank, who (as any scientist can imagine) desperately wanted to get back into the lab and work. He was caught in a punitive double bind: constantly harassed by the FBI, he couldn't find a research position in the United States, yet the government wouldn't let him leave the country.

Eventually Frank started teaching high school near his ranch, in tiny Pagosa Springs, Colorado. He created the first physics course the local school ever had - after he resolved a little snag about teaching credentials (the state made him take correspondence courses to get a teaching certificate, since the nuclear physicist and former professor didn't have any undergraduate credits in education.) One of Oppenheimer's former students remembered, "we could never get a science teacher. Then in walked this super high-class atomic physicist who was working on the atomic bomb." Fortunately for the hundred students of Pagosa Springs, unlike many other "super high-class" scientists, Frank was a truly gifted and intuitive teacher. Cole observes, "as Frank's students graduated and went on to college, word of their ability spread. A Caltech physicist, Hal Zirin, then at the University of Colorado, remembers that a stream of stellar students suddenly started arriving at the university from Pagosa Springs."

Cole arranges her book to show how Frank's life experiences made him the (only?) man who could both conceive the Exploratorium, a completely open space to play, explore, make mistakes and learn from them, and make it come to life - on charisma, charm and a shoestring budget. She sees the museum as his idealistic, populist response to the horror of the nuclear bomb he helped build: an effort to combat fear by empowering people to engage in self-directed learning.

Sun Painting
Bob Miller
exploratorium.edu

Artists and scientists, Frank liked to say, are the official "noticers" of society -- those who help us pay attention to things we've either never learned to see or have learned to ignore.

From the beginning, Frank rejected traditional boundaries between disciplines. In his essay "Rationale for a Science Museum," he titles one section "A Possible Poem of Organization For Such a Science Museum." He compared particle accelerators with Gothic cathedrals. He invited San Francisco artists like the late Bob Miller to create installations like the Sun Painting, a sculpture of prisms and mirrors. Many of the displays in the Exploratorium are interactive art pieces, playing with light and sound. Frank's main requirements were that a display be intriguing, that it have good aesthetics - which meant "feeling nice" to the user and working well, even if it was made out of screws and old plywood - and that its internal mechanisms be completely transparent to the viewer (which meant, for a long time, no computers). Above all, the displays were supposed to be fun. As science writer Natalie Angier recently wrote, in a spirit very much like Frank Oppenheimer's,

Of course you should know about science, as much as you've got the synaptic space to fit. Science is not just one thing, one line of reasoning or a boxable body of scholarship, like, say, the history of the Ottoman Empire. Science is huge, a great ocean of human experience; it's the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned. If you never learn to swim, you'll surely regret it; and the sea is so big, it won't let you forget it.

Of course you should know about science, for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun, and fun is good.

There's a reason why science museums are fun, and why kids like science museums. Science is fun. Not just gee-whizbang "watch me dip this rose into liquid nitrogen and then shatter it on the floor" fun, although it's that, too. It's fun the way rich ideas are fun, the way seeing beneath the skin of something is fun. Understanding how things work feels good. Look no further - there's your should. (from The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science)

The Exploratorium inspired many other science museums to embrace this childlike spirit. Britain's Exploratory Science Centre said in its 1983 Plan for Action, "There is, indeed, a House of Salomon, in New Atlantis - the Exploratorium in San Francisco which was founded by Dr. Frank Oppenheimer. It is Bacon's dream come true: an enchanted palace where anyone can by their own initiative, discover how things work; and a great deal about how he, himself or herself, understands and sees."

Cole worked for Frank Oppenheimer as a young writer, and clearly cared about him a great deal, so this is a tender, empathetic biography. Like everyone, Oppenheimer was flawed; Cole is clearly confused and distressed by his marital infidelities and occasional untruths (he initially lied about being a member of the Communist Party, a decision which would later haunt him). But she has written a poignant biography that rings true - you feel as if you would recognize Frank Oppenheimer if you met him on the street. When I watched Jon Else's 1982 documentary, Palace of Delights, I felt a flash of recognition when I glimpsed Oppenheimer peering from behind a cluster of visitors at an exhibit, with an expression of mingled pride and criticism. Whether or not Cole is right to focus so much on Oppenheimer as the Exploratorium's sole quickening spirit, I'd like to believe that he was every bit as playful and curious and idealistic and tenacious as his legacy suggests. It is profoundly comforting to me to know such people are in the world.

Reading this book was a celebration of everything I love about science, art, and teaching. I highly recommend it - especially for those of you who are teachers, museum curators, and educators (I've already ordered another copy and sent it to one of my friends who teaches high school science and robotics).

If in the course of some wandering I come onto something delightful or exhilirating or beautiful or insightful, I want to tell someone else what I have found. More than that, I want to bring them along with me to share what I have discovered: a view, a feeling, a person or a book or a new way of looking at physics or at justice, or a new way of teaching relativity.

All quotes are from Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up by K.C. Cole, unless noted otherwise.

More:

The Exploratorium
Rationale For a Science Museum
Palace of Delights, a 1-hour documentary by Jon Else

Read the first chapter of Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens here. (PDF)