Frank Oppenheimer and the Exploratorium: Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens

You must read this book.  YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.  I believe I’m not just enthusiastic about this because I have various deep professional connections to its subject — Frank Oppenheimer — but also because it’s a deeply inspirational look at a deeply inspirational man and his ideas.  He founded the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception, where I spent a wonderful two years.  The Exploratorium has a wonderful page on Frank Oppenheimer, including biographies, videos, and articles about the man.  This book — Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up — is not just a lovingly written autobiography, but a biography of ideas.  K.C. Cole does a fantastic job of describing the educational philosophy of her mentor, as well as how it infuses the institution that he built.

Frank was the brother of Robert Oppenheimer, of Manhattan Project fame.  Frank was also on the Manhattan Project, working on the bomb, but Robert directed the project.  He was blackballed during the McCarthy anti-communist era, and couldn’t do physics.  He spent ten years as a cattle rancher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.  He was eventually offered a lectureship here at the University of Colorado back in 1959, and I work closely with the instructor who now occupies the position that was created for Frank (senior instructor Mike Dubson).  Here, he created many of the experiments that are seen as a prototype for the Exploratorium exhibits.  Those exhibits are mostly lost — some have been absorbed into our lecture demonstration area.  I recently spoke with lab coordinator Jerry Leigh, who was interviewed for this book, and he gave me the original copies of the lab manuals created by Frank.  I’ll blog about those later, as I’m hoping that I can share them with the broader physics community.  Frank then went on to create the Exploratorium in 1969.

As you can see, I have several connections with Frank — physics, the University of Colorado, and the Exploratorium.  What struck me was that I recognized so many names — both here at CU and at the Exploratorium — who had connections with this man who died about 25 years ago.  Jerry Leigh, here at CU-Boulder, Mike Dubson, who now occupies Frank’s position, and many many names of people at the Exploratorium who I had no idea were there when Frank directed the museum.  And they’re still there.  What a testament to the vision that Frank had, and how important his colleagues feel it is to continue to breathe life into.

Being at the Exploratorium changed my life. I began to notice things in the world in a different way.  To stop, to take pleasure, and to wonder.  I’m not an innately playful person, at least when it comes to professional life, and the Exploratorium helped infuse me with some of the sense of whimsy that I’d like to make more a part of my life now.

To give you a taste of what I found so inspiration about the book, here are a few guiding principles of Frank’s vision as outlined by K. C. Cole in “Something Wonderful”:

Sightseeing

Sightseeing, said Frank, is the basis for discovery.  We look around at the world, and discover patterns.  But so often, the kind of sightseeing that we offer to students in a classroom is the kind of sightseeing that happens from a train window:

….unstoppable, irreversible, and dominated by the smells, sounds, and motions of the train rather than the landscape outside.  The people and towns along the way never become part of your experience.  The train is always rushing towards its next destination.

Real sightseeing requires you to get out of the train, wander at will, get lost, get dirty, linger as long as you like, and try things out just for the heck of it.  You can’t be guided, and you can’t have an agenda.

So, the Exploratorium was Frank’s “antidote” to the rushed schooling that we’ve experienced.

Legitimizing Play

Frank wanted children to run in the museum. He wanted a lack of control, to create an environment that was welcoming and comfortable.

Visitors could make genuine discoveries — not the kinds of discoveries students are urged to make in the “discovery method” of teaching, where they can discover only what the teacher had in mind.  Instead, all kinds of unexpected things were discvoered in the exhibits, even by the people who built them.  Frank thought play was serious business.

Frank described a time when he mixed everything in the house and got a horrible brown mess.  A waste of time?  No, research physicists get paid to “waste time” in this exploratory way.  The exhibit developers in the Exploratorium get paid to “waste time”, similarly.

“Occasionally, though, something incredibly wonderful happens,” he said.

Hence the name of the book.  When you play, you have the opportunity to create something new.

For Frank, play was never off limits, so he was usually a hoot to have around.  He might invite you to a meal that consisted entirely of experimenting with different ways of eating ears of buttered corn (if you slice each row down the middle with a sharp knife, for example,  you can eliminate the crunch).

Cole describes one time that Frank smashed a red lifesaver with a hammer, so the tiny ground particles looked white, because of scattering.  This is the same principle as why clouds look white, or sea foam.

Noticing

A similar theme in the book is the importance of noticing.  Like the sightseeing analogy, it is important to not just breeze through life, taking what you perceive for granted.  Half the time, we aren’t really looking.  According to Frank:

Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society.

I was always amazed at the exhibit builders at the Exploratorium:  they were so thoughtful, tuned into aesthetic, and — yes — they noticed.  They would spend hours tinkering with apparatus, seeing what happened if they sprayed lotus flowers with finer and finer droplets, or what happened when they tweaked the frequency in a vibrating platform.  One of my favorite exhibits is called Icy Bodies.  An image from this exhibit is below (and you can download this and many other for free to make wonderful desktop wallpaper):

Chunks of dry ice fall onto a surface covered with a thin film of water.  They swirl and jet across the surface, propelled by streams of sublimating dry ice.  The exhibit developer, Shawn Lani, described part of his development of this exhibit to me.  Originally, he had a button on the exhibit where visitors could drop more dry ice onto the watery surface.  But he found that then that became the point of the exhibit, and kids were hurriedly pressing the button.  They weren’t stopping to notice the beautiful formations.  So, in a seeming anti-Exploratorian move, he removed the interactive component.  Dry ice now falls into the exhibit on a little conveyer belt every few minutes.  But now visitors gather around, stop, and notice.  It’s mesmerizing.  K.C. Cole describes this exhibit in “Something Wonderful” — apparently Shawn Lani was a disciple of Ned Kahn (an artist who specializes in exhibits that make the invisible visible — see my other blog post about his work).

If others have read the book too, I’ll be curious what struck you about it, and what you took away.

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