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1912–1985
Frank Oppenheimer grew up in New York City. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in physics and later earned a Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, where he experimented with artificially induced radiation.
In 1941, Frank began working on uranium isotope separation, and, in 1945, he joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. This top-secret effort to produce an atomic bomb was directed by Frank’s brother, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
After the war, Frank became a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. But in 1949, he was forced to resign as a result of harassment by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Blackballed by McCarthy-era paranoia, Frank was unable to continue his physics research, and spent the next ten years as a cattle rancher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.
In 1957, he was drawn back into education as a science teacher at the local high school, which had fewer than 300 students and only one science teacher for all the grades. A tireless and innovative teacher, he took students to the dump and used abandoned auto parts to teach principles of mechanics, heat, and electricity.
With improvement in the political climate, Frank was offered an appointment at the University of Colorado in 1959. There, he revamped the teaching laboratory, creating a “library of experiments” that was in many ways a prototype for the Exploratorium.
In 1965, while in Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, Frank explored and studied European museums and became convinced of the need for science museums in the United States that could supplement the science taught in schools. When he returned home, Frank was invited to plan a new branch of the Smithsonian, but he declined, preferring instead to work on what he called his “San Francisco project”— a museum of his own.
Frank proposed to house his new museum in the vacant Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina district of San Francisco. The proposal was accepted by the city, and in 1969, with no publicity or fanfare, the doors opened to Frank’s Exploratorium. Frank nurtured and shaped the growing museum until 1985, when he died from lung cancer.
The qualities that made Frank so special are the same qualities that make the Exploratorium special: an insistence on excellence, a knack for finding new ways of looking at things, a lack of pretentiousness, and a respect for invention and play.
Related Exhibits
Levitating on an invisible stream of air, a beach ball seems to defy gravity. If you try to pull the ball out, you can feel a force pulling it back in—the same force that keeps an airplane in flight.
Tilt a spinning bicycle wheel while you’re sitting in a swivel chair and—surprise—you’ll start spinning in circles, too. You can also witness the same phenomenon here by hanging a spinning wheel from its axle.
Where: Gallery 4: Living Systems
Stare at a bird’s eye for 30 seconds, then look into the empty cage. You’ll see a ghostly bird—of a very different color—inside the cage
Gaze into the eyepiece at the blue light, looking for bright specks moving in short bursts against the background, and feeling your pulse as you watch them.
Where: Gallery 4: Living Systems
Step in front of this wall, and you’ll make shadows of various colors—yellow, magenta, cyan, red, green, blue, and yes, even black—that wiggle, jump, and dance along with you.
This reflector has you cornered: It always sends light back in the direction from which it came.
Start one of these two pendulums swinging and soon you’ll see the other pendulum start swinging, too. Keep watching and you’ll see the two pendulums take turns, alternately swinging energetically and coming to a near standstill.
Where: Crossroads: Getting Started
With the rope hanging down, the left and right sides of the board appear identical. Lifting the rope shows the dramatic difference that your eyes missed—and continue to miss, as soon as you let the rope fall again.
This curved mirror focuses both light and heat.
Light gets dimmer the farther it travels–and a bit of simple math explains how.