The Exploratorium

My first memories of San Francisco’s Exploratorium are not so much memories as memories of memories. I can recall the gigantic hanger inside the Palace of Fine Arts, the mild chaos of exhibits littered across its floor, and the pure joy of my seven-year-old self discovering that everything in the museum could be touched, cranked, prodded, poked. I can remember the cacophony of all that cranking and prodding. And I can remember the smells of machine oil and drying paint emanating from the open-air workshop, where exhibits were being constructed in real time.

One exhibit in particular stuck with me: an air blower shot a jet of air through a traffic cone whose end had been chopped off. A beach ball, placed on thiscushion of air, would hover in space, trembling and spinning as if charged by a set of invisible particles. The contraption, like all the best Exploratorium exhibits, seemed both cobbled together from spare parts and also very carefully designed. The chopping of the cone, for instance, must have arisen out of much experimentation. And now this little experiment had been handed over to us.

The best exhibits are an invitation to investigate further. I soon discovered that you could tip the mouth of the blower at an angle, such that the ball would gently inch outwards, hovering precariously as you tipped ever further, testing a hypothesis that you were only now just formulating.  How far could you push this impossible bargain? What, exactly, was keeping the ball suspended in air and not shooting off into the great beyond or tumbling back to earth as it so clearly should? My young mind spun with questions: What collision of forces was at work here? What other fragile balance points existed in a world of constant change?

*

When I was a child, the Exploratorium was still housed in the Palace of Fine Arts, one of the last remaining buildings from the great Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. The PPI Exposition was a sprawling, 636-acre invented city, constructed as both a celebration of San Francisco’s rebirth after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906 and a wild reimagining of possible futures through such structures as the 435-foot-tall Tower of Jewels, the Fountain of Energy, and the Court of Abundance. A barge dubbed “The Scintillator” mimicked the Northern Lights by projecting a multitude of colors into the swirling fog using forty-eight searchlights. The exposition featured one of the country’s first transcontinental telephone lines, enabling people in New York to hear the live churn of the Pacific Ocean.

Built from plaster, faux travertine, and chicken wire, the exposition’s buildings were designed to be temporary. Chief architect George Kelham imagined a greatcity that would quickly fall into ruins. The beloved Palace of Fine Arts, itself designed as a faux Greco-Roman ruin, was ironically one of the few buildings chosen to be preserved after the exposition concluded. Yet the Palace would languish for decades, searching for a purpose. Over time, its great hall contained tennis courts, WWII jeeps, limousines for diplomats, and a gigantic repository of telephone books. All the while the fictional ruin was falling into actual ruins. The Palace was eventually demolished in 1964 and completely rebuilt into its exact, original dimensions using lightweight cement—a false ruin resurrected.

This was how Frank Oppenheimer discovered the building in 1969, when he founded the Exploratorium and began filling the hall’s 90,000 square feet with exhibits that he concocted alongside a wonderfully happenstance team of scientists, artists, young people, and friends. In those early days, anything went—Mr.Oppenheimer would pilfer curious devices from wherever he could find them, including the National Bureau of Standards, who generously donated a 1933 shoe tester featuring a small Ferris wheel of shoes clomping along a mini treadmill. The Palace had found its purpose.

In some ways, this new museum of discovery was an antidote to the atomic bomb, which Frank Oppenheimer had worked on with his brother Robert. Like many in the Manhattan Project, Frank had been profoundly affected by the mass obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a weapon he had helped to create. After the war, he dedicated much of his life to warning the world against the dangers of nuclear proliferation, despite constant FBI surveillance and an accusation of Communist Party membership that effectively ended his academic career. For a time, he worked as a cattle rancher in Colorado before discovering a new passion for high school teaching. An idea began to formulate in his mind: Frank wanted to create a place of science and art that did not culminate in an endpoint of ultimate destruction but rather revolved around creation and curiosity; he wanted to cultivate, as he called it, “a woods of natural phenomena.” The Exploratorium was born.

To this day, a sign hangs above the exhibit workshop, with its wafting scent of machine oil: “Here is Being Created the Exploratorium, A Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness.”

*

Like the beach ball floating in the museum, San Francisco often feels suspended at its own fragile balancing point, a collision of forces in flux, ready to come crashing down at any moment. It is a magic trick of light and fog and belief, of creative genius, of speculation, of vast inequality, of nature and elevation, of storytelling and reinvention and reinvention again.

Over time, I’ve been enchanted by both the city and the idea of the city. I grew up on the East Coast but relished visiting my Aunt Susan, a leftist lawyer, who moved out to California and never came back. The Bay Area offered a young Bostonian an entirely new palette of sensory information—the smell of eucalyptus, the summer chill of fog rolling through a cypress grove, the streets that climbed ever upwards before plunging down again. This was a dream you could explore in real time.

I came back to the city many times, including the summer after my freshman year in college, when my friend Andrew and I drove my mother’s ailing Toyota Camry station wagon across the country. We blew out the Camry’s brakes in the Wind River range in Wyoming, but somehow still made it through Zion and Vegas and the Sierra Nevadas to the Pacific Ocean and the City by the Bay.

That summer was the first time I felt true independence. We stayed with my aunt at her house in Point Reyes and took jobs digging ditches for a contractor—inglorious work in a glorious place. We saved up our money to drive into the city and buy turntables and go to concerts and sleep outside on beaches, awakened by Park Rangers simultaneously chastising and affirming our life choices.

Amidst it all, I found myself returning again and again to the Exploratorium. Not as a child filled with ideas of play, but as an aspiring teacher, having just started studying education in college. I watched as children poked and prodded the exhibits, remembering my own explorations, but also, in a way, revisiting the moment I was in now by anticipating coming back to this museum and reviewing this moment in the future. André Aciman calls this kind of time travel “mnemonic arbitrage,” and the open-mindedness of the Exploratorium—with its absence of guidance or signage, its attention to the big questions of force and perception and impermanence—often invites such existential speculation. It is a kind of church with a hand crank.

Around me, the children would make wrong turns and false starts, stumbling upon discoveries and divergences. The beach ball still was there, trembling in space. I watched a boy who was not at all interested in keeping the ball suspended but rather in seeing how far he could shoot it across the room, possibly at his sister. Another girl put her face directly into the cannon of air, delighting as her hair went everywhere, her cheeks bending and flapping grotesquely. Later, I would see a sign taped above an exhibit designer’s desk: “No one ever flunked a science museum.”

As I went on to teach in classrooms in Rhode Island, England, Botswana, and South Africa, the Exploratorium would remain a pedagogical touchstone for me, with its carefully designed chaos, its trust in open-ended inquiry, its evolution of side quests into main quests, its great sense of child-centered play. The belief that asking questions, and not finding answers, is how we move into mindfulness. I loved that the exhibits remained a bit rough around the edges and open to revision, the presence of the open-air workshop a reminder that all of this was clearly under construction, that all of us are tinkerers, that we remain, in many ways, a loving work in progress.

*

I remained a work in progress. I tinkered. I got married, had kids. I published a few books. I visited San Francisco briefly but was not able to perform my curiosity pilgrimage to the Exploratorium. I’d heard that the institution had made a seismic move from its celebrated hanger inside the Palace of Fine Arts’s glorious ruin to an even larger, fancier space on the waterfront, news that filled me with preemptive dread. I was already mourning the loss of the rough edges, the questions without answers.

Indeed, the museum’s move seemed to correspond with a larger cultural shift away from the values inherent in the old Exploratorium—that of open-form investigation, of slow-motion co-construction, of productive messiness. I worried that a museum dedicated to “awareness” might struggle in this new attention economy, where we are subjected to what Princeton Professor D. Graham Burnett calls “human fracking,” in which our attention is constantly being extracted by corporate algorithms that are adaptive and relentless.

In my travels I’ve noticed that many of our cultural spaces—museums, arenas, airports, waiting rooms, sidewalks, even libraries—have begun to resemble a series of corporate TikTok feeds, radiating a manufactured, “safe” curiosity. The vibe is polished; everything is infinitely consumable; a question is only asked when the answer is already known. And yet the illusion of wonder acts as a disguise for the subtle transactions taking place, the subsuming of our awareness with an endless stream of comfort-slop. I could not help but worry what this Exploratorium 2.0 would look like in the age of the ad-sponsored TikTok thirst trap.

I decided to enlist my eleven-year-old son, Holt, to see what had become of the Exploratorium of my childhood. Holt is a dreamy, curious fellow, the type of kid who might spend several hours at a single exhibit. The Exploratorium is his type of temple—he glimpses the divine in a stream of water that can be dammed, released, and dammed again. Often, I find myself hustling him from one station of life to another, but I made a pact not to rush him, to allow his visit to unfold naturally, however long that might take. There was a chance that we would not make it past the entrance.

Several years ago Holt had declared that San Francisco was his favorite city in the world—despite never having been there. Perhaps it was because he had read a book about the Golden Gate Bridge construction or the cable cars, but the city had already taken on a mythological status in his mind. His memories of the city were fictive but no less persuasive.

Arriving at SFO, we drove up Highway 101 from sunshine into fog into sunshine again, past a series of AI billboards that seemed to be in conversation only with themselves. There were offers to replace bored human workers with AI, to supply a stable of realistic AI voices, to optimize your AI workflows, to generate bespoke AI music for your event space, to use AI to problem-solve your own AI platform.

“What does that even mean?” asked Holt, pointing to a particularly inscrutable billboard that was written almost entirely in code.

We were witnessing the latest speculative craze gripping San Francisco, or at least a certain population within the city. Another boom was here, another fever dream. Many people in the city that I talked to were in agreement: AI was here to stay. This was different from the other booms. This one was real. This one would change everything.

Holt, like many kids his age, seems at once fascinated by AI and also deeply disappointed by its overreach, as though it were a hungry beast who has arrived at the party and now wants to take away all the fun of creation. One moment he wants to ask ChatGPT to explain the entire world and the next moment he will go full analog and start drawing a crossword by hand. And yet, he also seems to understand that the hungry beast will inevitably win. I don’t envy him growing up in a world where the rules of the game are changing so fast.

Later, Holt and I took a Waymo, one of the now-ubiquitous self-driving cars gliding through San Francisco’s streets, a white SUV chariot adorned in its pantheon of spinning Lidar appendages. Holt could not believe that there was no human in the driver’s seat. He was entranced by the steering wheel, spinning of its volition. He complimented the car’s driving. He never complimented my driving. When a woman seemed to think about stepping out into traffic, the Waymo slowed, but did not stop, and when she retreated, it continued. Holt clapped at such restraint and conviction.

I wondered aloud if the Waymo might be taking someone’s job.

“There are other things that a person can do now,” he said. “We need Waymos everywhere.”

Not long after our first Waymo ride, we experienced the kind of whiplash that often happens in San Francisco. We were headed to the Fidget Camp Interactive & Mischief Art Showcase in the Mission to see a project by a friend who had created an AI visual dreamscape born of a live collaboration between one participant who would hold up colorful objects and another participant who would offer a stream-of-consciousness monologue in a soundproof booth. The resulting “dreams” were disturbing, hypnotic, and weirdly personal. George Clooney and Donald Trump slow-danced cheek-to-cheek on a beach. A flooded city suddenly burst into flames. A girl clutched a pillow in her bedroom.

On our way to the show, we turned on Mission near 16th Street and were suddenly confronted with encampments that stretched for several blocks. We found ourselves ensconced in a sea of humanity—it looked, to the untrained eye, like a refugee camp. Holt was shocked by the sight. “But where do they live?” he asked.

I thought of the driverless car we had just been in, the magic trick of removing the human from the equation. This seemed like a more pernicious trick: removing the house from the equation. And yet it is not just San Francisco; cities as human ecosystems are failing people everywhere. The presence of people living on the street remains a constant reminder that we have purposefully chosen not to take care of everyone in this country, even if we say we want to. I’d just talked to someone who was earnestly trying to solve the affordable housing crisis using AI, as though it were simply an algorithm to be tweaked.

“Kids coming through!” one of the sidewalk residents called out as we walked by. Items were quickly hidden from view. Despite it all, at least in the Mission, there was still a sense of community and collective responsibility. The people were working with what they had.

*

As Holt and I walked through the doors of the Exploratorium’s new gigantic space on Pier 15, I steeled myself for a letdown. I was ready for the magic I recalled from childhood to be lost in a haze of slick attention grabs, for this to become just another middling tourist draw along the waterfront.

Perhaps I should’ve taken a page from Frank Oppenheimer’s book and been more generous with my approach. Despite its touristic overtones, San Francisco’s waterfront is a miracle of reinvention. It only exists in its current, pedestrianized form because the Embarcadero Freeway, which once ran along the water and effectively severed the city from the bay, was damaged in the 1989 earthquake and subsequently torn down, replaced by a tree-lined promenade. What a noble experiment: to privilege the human over the automobile, to create by taking away.

I am relieved to report that much of the museum’s ethos has remained the same. Despite the change in location, the passage of decades, the advent of the smartphone, Frank’s spirit of experimentation persists. You can still find many of the same exhibits, cobbled together from spare parts. The beach ball still floats. Kids were still using that jet of air to blow their faces into strange shapes. Cranks were still cranked. Questions were still asked, and answers, while more present than I remembered, were still secondary to the quest itself.

Holt, as I had expected, settled in as though he were returning to an ancient homeland. He would bounce around a few exhibits and then find one that resonated with his particular interests, like the kinetic sandbox or the light island prism table or a new exhibit in the prototype section that allowed you to see how fast competing ideas spread through social networks. I enjoyed watching him move through the space, but something felt different. I no longer experienced that sense of mnemonic arbitrage, where layers of memories were reacting and overlapping like the light on the prism table. I could not recall an old version of myself performing these same explorations. I was stuck. Time had broken apart. Then remained then. Now was nowhere in particular. What was happening? Had the place changed? Or was it me?

I also noticed a certain “exhibit anxiety” that I hadn’t felt before. This space is even larger than the Palace of Fine Arts, with multiple levels, and now an outdoor observation deck that beautifully interlaced the museum into the city. It was better organized, with numbered galleries and a more obvious visitor flow. But I was dogged by the feeling that I needed to see ALL of it, that I might miss out on a particularly cool epiphany. I was suffering from FOMO, from optimization creep, even though I knew optimization was its own brand of blindness. I looked over and saw two teens Instagramming themselves and their upside-down reflections.

I had made a promise not to look at my phone while I was in the museum, but then Holt asked me to take a slow motion video of a ball bouncing through a series of elevated hoops that he had spent fifteen minutes aligning, and once it was out, it was out, and my attention, as usual, drifted from here to there and then everywhere. I was both the buyer and the seller. I was fracking myself.

I think part of the issue was: there was just so much. I found myself almost wishing that I could have a more curated experience, a story-path—that someone would take Holt and me by the hand and tell us where to go, where to stay. But I also knew Frank Oppenheimer, or the ghost of Frank Oppenheimer, would not stand for this. He would want us to butt up against the limits of our desire, to find our own way and get lost and find our way again. To write our own story.

We did get a short backstage tour of the exhibit workshop by Eric Dimond, Senior Director of Exhibits, an enthusiastically bearded gentleman in my age bracket who had worked at the Exploratorium for years, in both of its locations. In a parallel life, this could’ve been me.

The workshop was not quite as messy as I’d expected. Fabricating was serious business. Apparently, there was a whole other, even larger workshop on Pier 17, and I began to get a glimpse of how the Exploratorium had evolved from a lovable hodge-hodge of Frank’s friends and young explainers into a wide-ranging business model that exported Explortoria all over the world. The institute had grown up, for better or worse.

Even in its expanded state, the workshop was designed as a space for fertile creation. Eric told us how artists and scientists worked side by side but always in the context of a specific project, that purposeful constraints were key to successful creativity, design, and execution. The process was wandering, exploratory, but bounded.

He stopped and gestured at a huge wall of drawers that contained all the spare parts for each one of the three hundred exhibits. Light bulbs, gears, and rods spilled forth. I wished I had a magical drawer-wall of spare parts for my life.

“There is nothing worse than a well-designed exhibit that’s broken,” he said. “We try to fix things within the hour.”

Eric also showed us a giant robotic hand called “Manifold,” designed by choreo-roboticist-in-residence Catie Cuan. The hand’s delicate finger gestures were surprisingly expressive, opening an inherent non-verbal dialogue with the visitor. Ms. Cuan’s creation, currently getting serviced in the workshop, was part of the new “Adventures in AI” exhibition.

Adventures in AI? I felt like my wires were getting crossed. Artificial Intelligence, which had so bewitched the rest of this city, did not belong in here, land of cranks and pulleys and physical phenomena. AI does not learn creatively, as we do, asking existential questions of past and future, but through vast, brute-force training runs of trial and error. AI harbors no mortal fear of its own death. AI does not perform mnemonic arbitrage. Unless, of course, we train it to.

And yet, I found the exhibit to be typically thoughtful, born not of flashing lights and sexy robots but these same deep questions of existence. What is intelligence? asked one exhibit, showing us a range of intelligent (and not so intelligent) behavior from various species. Another exhibit simply asked you to arrange pantry items into categories (surprisingly fun!) and then made subtle connections as to how a machine might categorize unfamiliar objects. At one station, you made shadow puppets that the computer would try to recognize with varying levels of certainty (Umbrella! Dog! Umbrella-dog!). An art piece by Mimi Onuoha called “The Library of Missing Datasets 4.0” contained a range of filing cabinets filled with empty folders like “How consciousness arises” or “All extinct languages” and explored what knowledge could be known and what would remain unknown. The empty folders will always outnumber those that are filled.

A bulletin board offered a place for visitors to share their hopes and fears about AI. Someone had written for their fear, “I will stop thinking,” and their hope, “I will keep thinking.”

Surprisingly, the exhibit calmed me. There was no jumping to conclusions, only more questions, and I began to feel hopeful. If we were to treat AI with this same level of open-ended curiosity, instead of pouring billions of dollars into an ever-illusive end goal of super intelligence, then the whole endeavor would feel less akin to the Manhattan Project and more like Frank’s vision of extending the woods out to meet a new kind of phenomenon, even if this phenomenon was not natural.

On that first day, we spent five hours at the Exploratorium. “I felt a bit rushed,” admitted Holt as we left. Still, we emerged from our time at the museum changed. Suddenly everything in the city felt like an exhibit waiting to be explored. We decided to do a few touristy things that I’d never done: we rode a cable car and went to Alcatraz and visited the Golden Gate Bridge, source of Holt’s original love for a fictional version of the city. All of these sites are such recognizable symbols that their symbolism has superseded the sites themselves: the idea of the thing has devoured the thing. Yet, as is often the case with even the most famous of tourist sites, when you actually begin to look they reveal themselves to be extraordinary and weird and completely improbable.

The San Francisco cable car, for instance, originally designed by Andrew Smith Hallidie in 1873, is an incredibly antiquated technology that exists nowhere else in the world, mostly for good reason. Perhaps it was a good idea in 1873, when horses were falling backwards trying to climb up the city’s steep hills, but such a system really makes no sense in 2025. Which is what makes it so miraculous and beautiful.

As you walk down the cable car tracks, you can hear the constant rattle of the cable beneath the pavement. This is the call of the big dreamer. All these rattling cables in the city run to a single powerhouse, also the site of the Cable Car Museum. The powerhouse is filled with giant, spinning wheels that seem birthed from the mind of a steampunk inventor. It smells, not unlike the Exploratorium workshop, of motors and wires and the persistence of belief.

The cable cars themselves have no locomotion. They run when an expert cable operator pulls a giant lever and grabs hold of the cable. There is so much that can go wrong with this city-wide rope-a-dope. Wires can snap, grips can loosen, cars can run away and crash. Why oh why oh why?

Because we are time travelers. We are smitten by wheels that once spun and continue to spin, by a past that greets us in the present tense. When we ride the cable car, we place ourselves in the then and now. We are headed in both directions. We are in a world filled with cables, and when we disembark we are in love with where we are because of the distance between what was and what is. The cable rattles on.

Holt delighted in seeing a Waymo waiting for a cable car to pass, without a hint of impatience.

“We need cable cars everywhere,” he said.

We went to the Alcatraz, itself a site of overlapping histories, once a fort, then a prison, then briefly occupied by American Indians, now a National Historic Landmark, home to a giant colony of multilingual audio-tour devices and gulls and cormorants, whose excrement gives the island its particular je ne sais quoi.

On our way to Golden Gate Bridge, we got side-quested into the Presidio, once a military fort and now a remarkable National Recreation area that has undergone an elegant transformation. Along its shoreline, Crissy Field, an abandoned military airfield that became a “derelict concrete wasteland” and has now been restored into a vast recreation field and tidal marsh.

Nearby Doyle Drive, the unsightly raised highway that once cut through the heart of the Presidio, has been lowered into a ground-level parkway that carefully winds through several glorious cut-and-cover tunnels, allowing parkland to flow down to the water’s edge. This reconnection, called Tunnel Tops—envisioned by Michael Painter and no doubt inspired by the Embarcadero Freeway’s own devolution—was decades in the making. Like all great projects, Tunnel Tops feels deceptively as if it has always been there, as if there could have been no other solution. The meadows and playgrounds cross over the roadway into the Field Station, a beautiful little building designed very much in the ethos of the Exploratorium, where visitors can take part in naturalist experiments, examine scientific tools and artifacts, draw maps, and absorb the Presidio’s layered, living history. The Tunnel Tops now spiritually connect this part of the city, as the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts glides into the fields of the Presidio and on to the Golden Gate Bridge beyond.

At the Golden Gate Bridge Visitor Center, Holt tried to count all 27,572 wires stuffed inside a cross section of one of its giant cables. The fog, which had lingered over the city all week, had finally cleared, giving us sweeping views up the Marin headlands all the way to Point Reyes. It was typically majestic. But as we stood and surveyed the bridge, painted in that succulent International Orange, I was worried that for Holt the Real Thing might not live up to the Idea of the Thing.

“It’s probably the most beautiful structure in the world, wouldn’t you say, Dad?” he said and took my hand.

On our last day in San Francisco, we had the afternoon free. I wondered aloud what we might do. But there was really only one answer.

We had only one hour before closing, but it was enough. This time, we chose just one small area of the Exploratorium and explored without rushing. We played; we collaborated; we squirted each other in the eye at the prisoner’s dilemma water fountain.

I was filled with the warmth of memories. I remembered not just my visit with my son a few days ago, and the visits I had made over the years to an older version of this place, but the future visits I would make with Holt, remembering how I had laughed and wiped water from my eyes, and even the visits he would make without me, after I was gone, as he recalled the first time he saw the city of his dreams.