Full transcript
Frank
Frank Oppenheimer was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. After the war the House Un-American Activities Committee came for him; he was forced out of the University of Minnesota in 1949 and spent nearly a decade running a cattle ranch in Colorado. When he came back to science he had a conviction that the public understood almost nothing about how the physical world worked — and that was not the public's fault. Scientists had stopped explaining. In late August 1969 he opened the Exploratorium in the Palace of Fine Arts, with almost no fanfare. Every exhibit was built to be touched, pushed, cranked and broken. The philosophy was: if you cannot interact with it, you are not learning from it. That idea — a hands-on science center for the general public — did not exist before Oppenheimer invented it.
What You Are Standing In
The Exploratorium moved here to Piers 15 and 17 in April 2013. The building is a restored pier with six hundred exhibits spread across indoor galleries and an outdoor plaza. There is a tornado you can walk through, a fog bridge, a giant concave mirror that makes you look like you are floating, and a room where your shadow freezes on the wall. Everything works. That is the operational miracle of this place — six hundred interactive machines, most of them built in-house at the machine shop you can watch through a glass wall, and they are all working because a team of explainers resets them every morning.
How to Do It
Do not try to see everything. Pick a gallery — the Tinkering Studio if you have kids, the Seeing gallery if you like optics, the Living Systems if you want to watch plankton under a microscope. Give each exhibit thirty seconds of your hands before you decide whether to stay. Some of the best ones look like nothing at all from a distance.