Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up

  • K.C. Cole
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2009. 416 pp. $27 9780151008223 | ISBN: 978-0-1510-0822-3

Alfred Russel Wallace wrote that Charles Darwin never lost “the restless curiosity of the child”. One could say the same of the experimental physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985), younger brother of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose life has been far more documented. Like Robert, Frank was involved in leftist politics in ways that damaged his career; unlike Robert, Frank's relentless enthusiasm allowed him to forge a dramatic comeback. His masterpiece was the San Francisco Exploratorium in California, through which he influenced the lives of countless people.

Frank Oppenheimer brought a “rancher's aesthetic” to the Exploratorium science museum. Credit: THE EXPLORATORIUM, WWW.EXPLORATORIUM.EDU/E. KUTNICK

K. C. Cole, a journalism professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is one of those people. In the early 1970s, the magazine Saturday Review assigned the fledgling writer — who says she had “no interest in science whatsoever” and thought an accelerator was a gas pedal — to cover the Exploratorium. She was transformed by meeting Frank, who struck her as “a kind of Yoda” and helped to launch her career as a science writer. Her enthusiasm is the reason that her book Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, although not deep or probing, is affectionate and evocative.

Frank and Robert were born in Manhattan, New York, to a “little royal family” whose cultivated parents collected art and sent their children to private school. In 1936, while a graduate student in physics at the California Institute of Technology, Frank and his wife Jackie joined the Communist Party; they quit, disenchanted, in 1940. During the Second World War, Frank worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, watching the blinding explosion of the first nuclear test alongside his brother, who was director of the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico. After the war, Frank studied cosmic rays at the University of Minnesota. In 1949, he was forced to resign and was blacklisted, unable to obtain employment in an academic institution.

Unfortunately, Cole glosses over these years, relying on familiar sources of sometimes doubtful reliability. She does not explore Frank's membership of the Communist Party, calling it “civic minded” and accepting at face value his remarks that it was a “casual thing”. Oddly, she also glosses over his scientific work. Although she says that Frank found cosmic rays “truly fascinating” and cites an obituary that calls his articles “landmark research”, she doesn't even tell us the papers' titles.

Unable to find a job in physics, Frank retired with Jackie in 1949 to an isolated cabin near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, to become a farmer. A “gentle Jewish intellectual from Manhattan”, Frank initially did not even know how to turn grass into hay. He doggedly set out to teach himself, selling an inherited Vincent van Gogh painting to pay his expenses.

Cole is more at home writing about a character in an intimate setting than as an actor on a scientific or political stage. She gives us vivid portraits of Frank delivering newborn animals in the snow, “pulling on the legs of the emerging calf while Jackie read instructions out loud from a veterinary manual”. And she recalls a neighbour telling her of how Frank once became incensed by a cow's refusal to enter a pen and began to curse wildly, his expletives echoing back and forth across the valley.

In the 1950s, Frank became a respected community member, an elected representative of local cattlemen and a teacher at the local high school. He galvanized the childrens' interest in science, making them dissect farm animals and disassemble car engines at the scrapyard. To the bafflement of Colorado officials, students from Pagosa Springs — until then a little-known farming community — began raking in prizes at state science fairs.

In 1959, Frank was offered a teaching job at the University of Colorado, where he thrived. The enthusiastic reception to a talk he gave in 1966 on science and education set him on the track to creating the Exploratorium, which opened in 1969.

Cole's real subjects are the early years of the Exploratorium and its charismatic, maddening creator. The museum was always a work in progress, having a “rancher's aesthetic” — exhibits were donated and jerry-built such that a foot-pedal lathe became an electricity generator, or a traffic light became an optics lesson. Events included the dissection of a pig's eye. Children played truant to hang out there, teenagers got high there because of all the perceptual stimulation and adults found it exotic and magical.

Cole writes of her own interactions with Frank. Even simple encounters such as eating a meal could turn into an adventure: he once fashioned a gyroscope for her “out of pats of butter and a bread plate to explain precession”. The book strings together many vignettes of Frank in action. It does not matter that his ruminations on life are of uneven value and varying coherence — it captures important parts of the man.

Cole charts the encroaching bureaucratization of the Exploratorium, and the final weeks of Frank's life as he died of cancer. The touching death scene is disrupted when, to the horror of his wife and children, Frank's mistress arrives to profess her devotion — just one of several irruptions of libidinal chaos.

The vividness of this scene whets our appetite for more insight into the 'royal family' itself. Robert married an alcoholic and was himself an adulterer; his daughter committed suicide. In her book, Cole tells us little of Frank's children, not even when they were born. The Oppenheimer family, we suspect, has yet to reveal all of its dark sides. But by shunning a traditional biographical tapestry, Cole successfully, and at times movingly, limits her focus to Frank's infectious passion for science.