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| Exploration and Discovery | |||
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| Frank Oppenheimer, Exploratorium Acceptance speech for the AAM Distinguished Service Award - June 21, 1982 | |||
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| Thank you very much. I worried about this speech more than any other that I have given and now I am even more worried about it. I am, of course, extraordinarily honored to receive this distinguished service award from the American Association of Museums. I do want to thank Ken Starr again. It was he who first told me about the award. We have been friends and have become terribly fond of each other over the years so this is a wonderful occasion for me. I am also especially pleased to have an award from AAM because when I first started developing a science museum, there was no organization whatsoever which thought of science centers as part of the museum world. Since we didn't have collections in the normal sense of the word, we weren't eligible to join the AAM. So it seems that this award is not only to me but to the entire field of science centers. I am extremely pleased with that. Science centers have grown and multiplied rapidly and impressively during the last 10 years and communication between them has become very important. But communication between all museums has been and will continue to be important, and is one of the extraordinary and vital things that the AAM accomplishes. Although all museums are based on props, most museums and perhaps especially science centers are basically museums of ideas. What we communicate in science centers are ways of thinking about nature or about technology. Such ways of thinking about nature traditionally have been part of the body of our culture. When we study the Greeks and when we look at the religions of ancient people, we invariably study the way people thought of nature in the world around them. |  | ||
| Today such thoughts about nature are developed by and come out of science. They are as imaginative and fantastic as they ever were. But what surprises me is the limited role that people now ascribe to science. That which was in the past considered culture, was called natural philosophy, is today denied its place in our culture. People continue to talk of the arts and music as culture but neglect the, fact that our view of ourselves, our role in the world and what the world is like, is equally and vitally a part of culture. | |||