Brian's email

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

Did you see this?  I forgot whether I forwarded it to you or not.

 > From: Brian
 > Date: Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:59:37 -0800
 >
 > Mon 2/1
 > 
 > Oh, no, wait, I /do/ have something interesting to write about.  One of the
 > side benefits of spending so much time on airplanes last month is that I
 > finally got to read Toby's present, the new(ish) biography of Frank
 > Oppenheimer, my hero, the guy who founded the Exploratorium.  I knew Frank
 > only slightly; I used to spend a lot of time there, and he used to spend a
 > lot of time out on the floor chatting with the visitors.  I remember there
 > was one event there at which they had a string arch held up by helium
 > balloons tied along it, and he and I had a conversation about whether the
 > curve formed by the string would be a catenary, the same as the more usual
 > downward-pointing one, since the forces at work are the same except that
 > gravity is effectively negative.  We decided that was right, and he was a
 > physicist so it's probably true.  :-)
 > 
 > Anyway, the book is great; it really vividly conjured up the spirit that I
 > remember, including reminding me of details I'd half-forgotten.  I had very
 > strong feelings reading it, partly just mourning his death all over again,
 > but also about myself.  In /so many/ ways Frank reminds me of me!  He had
 > the same left politics (more or less), he had the same ideas about education,
 > he had been a high school teacher who involved himself in the lives of the
 > kids he taught.  There was some poignant reading about how the innovations
 > he made kept going for a while after he left, but gradually died out (at the
 > school, I mean, not at the Exploratorium).  But the big difference between
 > him and me is that he built the greatest educational environment in the
 > history of the Earth, which completely changed everyone's idea of what it
 > means to be a science museum, so now all of them try to be Exploratorium-ish
 > (but still nobody else really gets it right), and which is still going strong
 > 25 years after his death.  I built a great (I still think) learning
 > environment that I could only support for 3 years and that hasn't influenced
 > anybody's ideas about anything much.  And in the last quarter-century I've
 > been a good but basically obedient teacher in a skool, somewhat disguised by
 > the fact that its inmates are volunteers, but still basically skool.