Frank Oppenheimer and the Exploratorium

The Exploratorium, the hands-on science museum on the Embarcadero, was the idea of a physicist who had been pushed out of American science. Frank Oppenheimer founded it in 1969, two decades after the political fallout that ended his university career.

The younger Oppenheimer

Frank Oppenheimer was the younger brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Los Alamos laboratory. Frank worked on the Manhattan Project as well, on uranium enrichment, and he was present at the Trinity test in 1945. In 1949 his earlier membership in the Communist Party became public and he resigned from the University of Minnesota. He spent most of the 1950s running a cattle ranch in Colorado, then teaching high school science in Pagosa Springs, before returning to university work at the University of Colorado.

A museum built around experiments

Oppenheimer opened the Exploratorium in 1969 in the Palace of Fine Arts, the Marina District building left over from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The city leased the space to the museum for a dollar a year. His idea was a museum where visitors worked the exhibits themselves instead of reading labels behind glass, an approach that science museums around the world later adopted.

The move to the waterfront

Oppenheimer died in 1985. In 2013, decades after his death, the Exploratorium moved from the Palace of Fine Arts to Pier 15 on the Embarcadero. The waterfront campus was built to run on net-zero energy, drawing on bay water for heating and cooling. It sits about a ten-minute walk north of the Ferry Building.

Visiting today

The Exploratorium is at Pier 15 on the Embarcadero. See the Exploratorium guide for current hours and admission.