Frank's Quotes While most of these quotes can be found in the other articles that are published on this site, we thought that we could supply you with a dose of "concentrated Frank" by gathering up some of our favorites. Reading these will (hopefully) give one a "feel" for his vision and hopes for the Exploratorium.

The whole point of the Exploratorium is to make it possible for people to feel they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up with that understanding. If they give it up with the physical world around them, they give it up with the social and political world as well. If you stop trying to understand things, and things keep changing, I think we'll all be sunk.

If people feel they understand the world around them, or, probably, even if they have the conviction that they could understand it if they wanted to, then and only then are they also able to feel that they can make a difference through their decisions and activities. Without this connection people usually live with the sense of being eternally pushed around by alien events and forces. I believe that the Exploratorium does help create or renew this conviction for very many people and that, especially for young people, it builds a desire to understand. I sense also that this is happening when I hear adult visitors tell me, "I wish that science had been taught this way when I was a kid... What they are telling me is that now, after a life-long rejection of the subject, they could in fact have understood it. The conveying to our visitors a sense that they can understand the things that are going on around them may be one of the more important things we do. This sense can then so readily extend to all aspects of people's lives. The intellectual apathy that I am told now exists among young people may have come about because these youths have never been convincingly taught the wonder of understanding or learned that when one does understand, then each person, as an individual or as a member of a group, can feel that they can make a difference.

Although the Exploratorium does not consciously glorify the achievements of people, it is impossible to come away without some sense of awe at the subtleties, complexities, and the almost unbelievable reliability of sensory information and processing. One also frequently comes away with a new awareness that causes one to stare, squint close one's eye, or cock one's head, in a word, to experience everyday phenomena.

The Exploratorium is not designed to glorify anything. We have not built exhibits whose primary message is, "Wasn't somebody else clever," or, "hasn't someone done a great service to mankind and the American way of life." Nor do we tell people what they are supposed to get out of a particular exhibit or make them feel silly or stupid because they enjoyed it in a way that was perhaps not intended. In this sense the Exploratorium is a playful place, and people are aware that they are not being pushed around.

The roots of science frequently lie in sight-seeing. In recent years much of high energy physics, especially bubble chamber analysis, has constituted little more than a very elaborate form of sight-seeing. The individual sights combine to form patterns, which constitute a simple form of understanding. The process continues beyond this stage as groups of seemingly disparate patterns then coalesce to form the patterns that provide the deepest insights about nature. We are exploring various forms of museum teaching and learning in the Exploratorium, but our effort would be worthwhile even if it did no more than provide some good sight-seeing. Sight-seeing always requires some amenities to make the sights accessible. If one is concerned with the interest and understanding of the general public then sight-seeing must not require, as it did with Marco Polo, an undue amount of heroism or expense.

Many people who talk about the discovery method of teaching are really talking about arranging a lesson or an experiment so that students discover what they are supposed to discover. That is not an exploration. The whole tradition of exploration is being lost for entire generations. It is, therefore, more important than ever that museums assume the responsibility for providing the opportunities for exploration that are lacking for both city and suburban dwellers. It would be fine, indeed, if they would, but it will take a bit of doing to do so properly. If museums are too unstructured, too unmanageable, people get lost and simply want to get back to home base. On the other hand, if they are too rigid, too structured or too channeled, there are no possibilities for individual choice or discovery. Exploring, like doing basic research, is often fruitless. Nothing comes of it. But also like basic research, as distinct from applied or directed research, exploring enables one to divert attention from preconceived paths to pursue some intriguing lead: a fragrance, a sight or smell, an interesting street or cave, an open meadow encountered suddenly in the woods or a patch of flowers that leads one off the trail, or even a hole in the ground! Often it is precisely as a result of aimless exploration that one does become intensely directed and preoccupied. A museum that allows exploration does not have to be disorganized either physically or conceptually. It does, however, mean that the museum must contain a lot of which people can readily miss, so that discovery becomes something of a surprise, a triumph, not so much of personal achievement as of personal satisfaction. It is the kind of satisfaction that invariably leads me to tell someone about the experience.

There is one piece of oft-repeated advice to which we have not paid the slightest attention. Over and over again, I have been lectured at by exhibit designers with the statement, "You have to decide who your audience will be." We recognize that it is essential that neither I nor the staff are bored by our exhibits, that we learn something as we make them and that we enjoy showing them to people, especially our friends and colleagues, over and over again.... As far as we can determine, there is no age limit, no training limit, nor any cultural limit to the range of people who use and enjoy the place. Preschool groups and old-folks-home groups come and come back. Mentally or sensory retarded groups repeatedly come and special classes for gifted students use the place as the basis for a variety of projects. Ours is one of the few formal institutions that attracts teenagers. There are two things misleading about the statement, "You have to decide who your audience is." In the first place, it is possible to make many, if not most, of the exhibits so that they can each individually be appreciated and enjoyed on a variety of levels. Secondly, it is ridiculous to think that every visitor should be able be appreciate or enjoy every exhibit in the museum. Not only should one not expect a visitor to become absorbed in very many exhibits, the atmosphere of the museum must be adjusted in such a way that people are relaxed about missing or not understanding something.

...a museum can be a hock shop and a Gumps window at the same time.

The Exploratorium architects wanted to build offices with low partitions that formed little work cubby holes with shelves for plants. They took me to see offices like that which they thought were very good. Everyone was working away in their cubby holes. Suddenly I shouted something out loud and everybody popped up out of their holes. I said to the architect, "See what would happen? I wouldn't be able to shout." He replied that such a place teaches people to talk softly. Well, I don't want to be taught - or to teach anyone - to talk softly. They said something else about stopping the children from running about inside the museum. Well, why should we stop children from running? I had a difficult time convincing the architects that they weren't really doing any harm. They hardly ever ran into anybody, but they appeared to be a little bit out of control and it worried the architects to see children behaving naturally. I think it's quite wonderful that we don't mind losing some control.

The works of artists and the didactic demonstrations of scientists and engineers combine to do more than show the sights. They alter, each in a characteristic mode, the way in which individuals perceive both their past and future experiences, and they make people aware of aspects of their surroundings that they have either learned to ignore or never been shown how to see.

In growing up one even ignores what people's faces are like, but by seeing paintings of people's faces you begin to look at them again, and I think that the same thing is true of science. You look at the sky and you see the stars, and it is just an amorphous mass; but suddenly somebody talks to you about it and you see that some stars move with respect to other stars. There are many examples of things that one just does not notice until either they are brought before one because one begins to understand them. They both change in this way, the way one looks at oneself and the rest of the world, and I think this is one of the reasons that science, as it has been taught, is so unattractive to many people, because it has not succeeded in changing the way they look at themselves.

We first try to decide what kind of effects or ideas are fundamental to an understanding of some aspect of science or nature. Then we sort out which effects are easier to understand if they are demonstrated rather than read about. Finally, we grope around for ways to effectively and captivatingly illustrate such effects. Outsiders who learn about what we are searching for will frequently help. Phil Morrison called from MIT to tell us of the exponential behavior of a bouncing ball; Luiz Alvarez sent us an article on a sequential array of long focal length lenses. Occasionally a staff member will read about some work in a journal or newspaper and contact the author. We gather a group of experts in linguistics, for example, or in visual perception. Invariably the group provides us with a great raft of ideas to work on. Since, as an ongoing process, we are expanding exhibit curricula and filling gaps in the ones we have, we have been able to afford the luxury of being responsive (albeit also selective) to the continual flow of ideas and of actual exhibit pieces that visiting scientists, teachers and artists bring to us.

One of the more productive employees of the Exploratorium said to me some years ago that he felt confused because what he was doing much of the time in the machine shop was just playing around with no particular purpose. He didn't see why he should be paid for doing that, even though his playing around sometimes resulted in the birth of wonderful and instructive exhibits; exhibits whose major purpose or form was in no way conceived at the outset of the playing around. My brother, when he was a young man, said his teaching made him feel he was giving somebody their money's worth, whereas almost none of his research calculations had anything to do with anything. It seemed hard for him to justify his being paid for just doing research. Whether it is exhibit-building or research or sculpture, so much time is spent just playing around with no particular end in mind. One sort of mindlessly observes how something works or doesn't work, or what its features are, much as I did when, as a child, I use to go around the house with an empty milk bottle pouring a little bit of every chemical, every drug, every spice into the bottle to see what would happen. Of course, nothing happened. I ended up with a sticky gray-brown mess, which I threw out in disgust. But much research ends up with the same amorphous mess and is or should be thrown out only to then start playing around in some other way. But a research physicist gets paid for this waste of time, and so do the people who develop exhibits in the Exploratorium. Occasionally though, something incredibly wonderful happens.

The way a place is, emerges from decisions made about many details. The general view is that an executive should not pay attention to all these details. I don't think that's the right way. It doesn't work when you are doing experiments and it doesn't work in art. A lot of museums are on the right track to start with. They have a picture of what they should be. Then there is pressure - it's rather like people who set up a symphony orchestra in order to play a certain kind of music, and when nobody comes to hear it, they change the repertoire.