Exploratorium

Frank

Physicist Frank Oppenheimer worked on the Manhattan Project with his older brother J. Robert. After the war he taught at the University of Minnesota until the House Un-American Activities Committee came. In 1949 he acknowledged before the committee he had briefly joined the Communist Party in the late 1930s. The admission cost him his position; no American physics department hired him afterward. For nearly a decade he ran a cattle ranch in western Colorado near Pagosa Springs, raising stock and repairing fences as he once repaired vacuum pumps. He taught physics to teenagers at a Pagosa Springs high school. That decade away from research labs is part of why the Exploratorium exists: Oppenheimer came back believing scientists had cut the public off from science by refusing to explain it. His museum opened in the Palace of Fine Arts in late August 1969; almost no one noticed for the first month. Look up at the grand entry rotunda ceiling. Trace the seams in the plaster that was new then.