I met him in our dormitory the day we entered college in 1964. He saw me struggling to carry my big luggage crates up the two flights of stairs to my dorm room and, without saying a word, grabbed one and hauled it to the second floor.
“Thank you!” I stammered when we reached the landing.
“Don’t mention it,” he said with a broad smile, and then offered his hand. “I’m Robbie.”
“Bob,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Good to meet you, Bob!”
He must have noticed I was exhausted by the effort, and lonely to boot. “It’s close to dinner time,” he said. “Wanna walk over to the dining hall?”
“Sure!”
That was the start of our friendship.
Robbie was intuitively kind. He combined a remarkable warmheartedness with a degree of compassion I had never known before. And it wasn’t only toward me. Every young man in our dorm, and many in our class, came to admire and depend on Robbie.
Robbie went missing in action in Vietnam on October 12, 1972. His body has never been recovered.
I think of Robbie on Memorial Day, as I do of others who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.
I was strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. I demonstrated and marched against it. I was too short to be drafted, but I detested it — the cruel absurdity of that war, the lies with which it was sold to the American people, the utter waste of it. In the end, more than 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives in it. Many more were grievously wounded.
But when I think of Robbie, I also remember his sense of duty. Duty was inseparable from his kindness. Whatever the situation, Robbie was eager to help.
What do we owe one another as members of the same society?
Our current president apparently believes we owe each other nothing. To him, everything is a transaction — a deal in which each of us is in it for as much money and power as we can get.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump denigrated Senator John McCain, whose plane was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.
McCain became a prisoner of war. The North Vietnamese offered him early release because McCain’s father was commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time. But the young McCain refused the offer in order to uphold the Code of Conduct, which stipulated that prisoners of war should be released in the order they were captured. As a result, he remained in North Vietnam for nearly five additional years, during which time he was put into solitary confinement and tortured.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said during the 2016 presidential campaign. Then he altered his comment: “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK?”
Trump avoided serving in Vietnam by claiming he had a bone spur in his heel. As Michael Cohen, Trump’s “fixer,” told members of the House Oversight Committee in 2019:
“Trump claimed [his medical deferment] was because of a bone spur, but when I asked for medical records, he gave me none and said there was no surgery. He told me not to answer the specific questions by reporters but rather offer simply the fact that he received a medical deferment. He finished the conversation with the following comment: ‘You think I’m stupid, I wasn’t going to Vietnam.’”
Finally now, in 2025, Trump is going to Vietnam. He and his family business are planning a $1.5 billion golf complex outside Hanoi and a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City — the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam.
According to TheNew York Times, the two projectsare part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale.
Robbie was never in it for himself. He did what he did because he felt he had an obligation to do it, for the nation he loved. It’s why I remember and honor Robbie on Memorial Day.
Headlines warn of a world in collapse, but solutions journalist Angus Hervey finds the overlooked triumphs that never make the news — from the rollout of malaria vaccines to the recovery of sea turtles. With hard data and stories from the frontlines, he reveals the hidden progress that perseveres even as it feels like the world is falling apart, and challenges us to decide which future we’ll help write.
Wake Forest Universi • Streamed live on May 19, 2025 Congratulations Class of 2025! Join us for Wake Forest University’s Commencement weekend on May 16–19. Graduation Exercises, where the President will confer undergraduate degrees, is on Monday, May 19, on Hearn Plaza, beginning at 9 a.m. and ending at approximately 1 p.m.
I wonder if there is a more-feared card in the Tarot deck? Yet Death is, in many ways, a hopeful and refreshing influence if only we will let it be. It is the major card for change and alteration in the entire deck. Since life itself changes constantly, in order to harmonise ourselves more completely with it, we too must be in a state of constant change – working toward our goals, attempting to fulfil our dreams and developing the quality of our spiritual understanding.When Death comes up as Card of the Day, the first question we need to ask ourselves is – what is it that needs to be changed or finished up? What situations have been lingering on well past their sell-by date? What should we have dealt with before, that this day challenges us to face and finish?Imagine, for a moment, that your life is a plot of land. If it is completely overgrown, covered with unwanted and untended undergrowth, you cannot plant something beautiful and fruitful in it can you?The Death card requires that we spend a bit of dedicated time cutting away the undergrowth, and clearing the debris so that our lives are clear and open, ready for fresh planting.Sometimes a Death card day won’t be one in which we need to do, so much as one in which we need to think. Most peoples’ lives are very busy indeed these days. So busy, in fact, that we often tend to put off thinking about the difficult or demanding issues in our lives. Yet often it is exactly this type of issue that causes emotional and mental deadwood to accumulate, if we allow it.If life is created by what we think, what we expect and how we feel about things, our deepest emotional urges, our wildest dreams, our highest ideals require a great deal of thinking about, don’t they? If not, we stagnate, never creating new channels through which to direct our energies, never determining when a habitual action has run its course, never assessing what is useful, and what is not.So, sometimes, a Death card day needs to be a day in which you re-evaluate the general patterns of your daily existence, and re-appraise your goals. You’ll know if it’s that kind of day by measuring how dissatisfied you currently feel. If you are largely happy and comfortable, then the Death card day is one for clearing the decks in a physical sense.
Affirmation: “I welcome change into my life, embracing it fearlessly and hopefully.”
“Toni Morrison said, ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else,’ and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad that you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page. Write an incredibly shitty, self-indulgent, whiny, mewling first draft. Then take out as many excesses as you can.”
― Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott (born April 10, 1954) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She is also a progressive political activist, public speaker, and writing teacher. Lamott is based in Marin County, California. Her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical. Wikipedia
On May 27th, 2025, we have a New Moon at 6° Gemini.
This is one of the most auspicious New Moons of the year – it is conjunct its ruler, Mercury, it’s trine Pluto in Aquarius, and sextile Neptune and Saturn in Aries.
The New Moon in Gemini has “opportunities” written all over it.
A new lunar cycle also means we are saying goodbye to the previous lunar cycle in Taurus – which was tense, to say the least.
The New Moon in Gemini will feel like a breath of fresh air, as if a heaviness has been lifted.
2 interesting things about this New Moon in Gemini:
1. First, it’s conjunct its own ruler, Mercury, which makes it extra potent and extra “Gemini.” Jupiter is also in Gemini, giving a magical boost to whatever we initiate.
If your intentions align with Gemini themes like writing, presentations, or online communication – to name a few Gemini themes – that’s the one to pursue!
2. Second, it aspects all the outer planets – Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto – as well as the newly ingressed Saturn in Aries. This is the first New Moon with Saturn in Aries fully, and it’s really kicking things into gear.
New Moon In Gemini – Opportunities
But the reason this New Moon is so special is that it initiates an important configuration that will unfold over the next few years: a minor triangle between the “Big 3” – Pluto, Neptune, and Uranus.
This is a spectacular configuration that supports change and progress at a rate we may have never seen before.
We are no longer in the Pluto-in-Capricorn / Neptune-in-Pisces era. The world looks very different from how it did prior to 2024, when Pluto moved into Aquarius.
Everything is being reconfigured – from alliances to systems of power and influence. Innovation and AI are changing the rules, but also opening new doors and possibilities.
We are entering a completely new world, where we have the chance to become active participants.
And Gemini will play a very important role in this new scenario. Jupiter has been turning Gemini into a prime venue for growth, paving the way for Uranus, which enters the sign in July 2025 to really accelerate innovation and change.
This shift from Earth to Air (Capricorn → Aquarius, Taurus → Gemini) means we are becoming less focused on earthy, tangible concerns like material accumulation or survival, and more attuned to how we connect with others and how we express ourselves.
Success and happiness will no longer be measured by the size of our bank account or the stability of our assets—but by our social connections, how much we stay active, and how we contribute to this new world to make it a better place (Saturn and Neptune in Aries).
How do we do this in a Gemini way? We expand our horizons. We learn new things. We stay curious and open.
How many times has an opportunity shown up either through a conversation, by reading a magazine, or by checking your emails or social media?
Gemini is our interface with the world – it’s where we take in bits of information, bits of inspiration, and from there, build something new.
Chances are, most opportunities in your life – even if you didn’t recognize it at the time – have come to you through some sort of Gemini activity.
The Sabian Symbol of this New Moon is “A well with bucket and rope under the shade of majestic trees.” The Sabian symbol speaks of quiet abundance and support – the universe is providing us with what we need; all we have to do is reach out and draw from it.
At the New Moon in Gemini, pay attention to whatever emerges – however subtle or ordinary it may seem – because it might just be the spark that sets your next big idea in motion.
A rift in thinking about who should control powerful new technologies sent the brothers on diverging paths. For one, the story ended with a mission to bring science to the public.
Every now and then, science serves up poison pills. Knowledge gained in the course of exploring how nature works opens doors we might wish had stayed shut: For much of the past year, our newsfeeds were flooded with stories about how computational superpowers can create amoral nonhuman “minds” that may learn to think better than we do (and then what?). On the big screen, the movie Oppenheimer explored a threat people have lived with for nearly 80 years: How the energy of the atom can be unleashed to power unimaginably destructive bombs.
When potentially catastrophic inventions threaten all humanity, who decides how (or whether) they’re used? When even scientists toss around terms like “human extinction,” whose voice matters?
Such questions were at the core of the Oppenheimer film, a blockbuster now nominated for more than a dozen Oscars. To me, the movie hit home for a different reason. I spent a great deal of time with Frank Oppenheimer during the last 15 years of his life. While I never knew his brother Robert, Frank remained anguished over what he felt was Robert’s squandered opportunity to engage the world’s people in candid conversations about how to protect themselves under the shadow of this new threat.
KC Cole and Frank Oppenheimer mixing images in Bob Miller’s Everyone Is You and Me (1980), an Exploratorium exhibit exploring perception, optics and light.CREDIT: COURTESY OF KC COLE
During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between the brothers (Robert — the “father of the atom bomb” — and his younger brother, Frank — the “uncle” of the bomb, as he mischievously called himself) were strained and for a time even fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world.
They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to tactics.
Robert — whose fame surged after the war — believed decisions should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power to make things happen — that is, people like himself. Frank believed just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win the peace.
In the end, both lost. Both paid for their efforts with their careers (although Frank eventually resurrected his ideas as a “people’s science museum” that had a worldwide impact).
Given that the question “Who decides?” underlies so much of today’s fast-evolving sciences, the brothers’ story seems more compelling and relevant than ever.
Ethical education
In many ways, the Oppenheimer brothers were very much alike. Both studied physics. Both chain-smoked. Both loved art and literature. Both had piercing blue eyes, inherited from their mother, Ella Friedman Oppenheimer, an artist with a malformed hand always hidden in a glove. Their father, Julius, was a trustee of the Society for Ethical Culture, dedicated to “love of the right.”
They shared a Manhattan apartment with maids, Renoirs, and books piled down the halls and into the bathrooms. Ella was terrified of germs, so tutors and barbers often came to them. Frank had his tonsils out in his bedroom. Both boys attended Ethical Culture schools in New York, so morality was baked into their upbringing.
But they were also in other ways opposites.
Robert and Frank Oppenheimer as children.CREDIT: FRANK OPPENHEIMER, COURTESY OF AIP EMILIO SEGRÈ VISUAL ARCHIVES
Robert was, by his own admission, “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” Frank was anything but. He sneaked out at night to scale New York City’s rooftop water towers; by high school, he was using the electric current in the family home to weld whatever metal he could get his hands on. He took apart his father’s player piano (then stayed up all night putting it back together).
Robert got through Harvard in three years and received his PhD from the University of Göttingen two years later, in 1927, at age 23. Frank didn’t get his PhD until he was 27. Robert was arrogant, picky about his company. Frank would talk with anyone and did, later befriending even his FBI tail.
When Robert joined the faculty at Caltech, he was described as “a sort of patron saint,” always center stage, smooth, articulate, captivating. When Frank arrived at Caltech many years later for graduate work, he was described as standing “at the fringe, shoulders hunched over, clothes mussed and frayed, fingers still dirty from the laboratory.”
Still, they loved each other dearly. Frank wept when Robert left for grad school in Europe. Robert wrote Frank that he would gladly give up his vacation “for one evening with you.” He sent his little brother books on physics and chemistry, a sextant, compasses, a metronome, along with letters full of brotherly wisdom. My personal favorite: “To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.”
In summer, they retreated to a cabin in the mountains of New Mexico, which Robert called Perro Caliente (Spanish for “hot dog”). They rode horses over 13,000-foot peaks, 1,000 miles a summer. During one night ride, Robert got knocked off his horse. “He was very thin anyway,” Frank said. “Here was this little bit of protoplasm on the ground, not moving. It was scary, but he was all right.”
On a road trip back to Caltech, Frank rolled the car into a ditch, breaking Robert’s arm. When Robert stopped at a store to get a sling, he came back with a bright red one, to cheer up his little brother, who he knew was feeling bad about the accident.
Frank Oppenheimer holds a gyroscope during his time as a high school teacher in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, in the late 1950s.CREDIT: STANLEY FOWLER / COURTESY OF KC COLE
The world around them was fraught, with fascism on the rise in Germany, Italy and Spain. The Depression meant people were still out of work. Robert kept mostly aloof from politics, but Frank dived in. He married a UC Berkeley student who was a member of the Young Communist League, then joined himself. He admired the Communists for taking unemployment seriously — and for understanding the threats posed by Hitler and Mussolini. His personal tipping point was the treatment of Blacks at a Pasadena public pool: Blacks were allowed only on Wednesdays; the pool was drained before the whites came back on Thursday. Only the Communist Party seemed concerned.
Robert didn’t approve of Frank’s decision to join the party, and he didn’t approve of his wife, Jackie, either, referring to her as “that waitress.” He accused Frank of being “slow” because it took him what Robert regarded as too long to get his PhD. He called Frank’s marriage “infantile.” The feelings became mutual. Jackie later regarded Robert and his wife, Kitty, as pretentious, phony and tight.
Frank soon realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a Communist, and quit. He felt the party was too authoritarian, and not as interested in social justice as in petty bickering. (Robert never joined, although Kitty had been a party member.)
From quantum theory to atom smashers
The brothers were both working as physicists when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. Robert, the theorist, was sharing the revolutionary physics of quantum mechanics with his American colleagues at Berkeley and Caltech, where he had joint appointments. Frank, a natural-born experimentalist, was working with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley on the rapidly developing technology of particle accelerators — known to some as “atom smashers.”
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer confers with Gen. Leslie Groves, the military lead of the Manhattan Project.CREDIT: US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY / PUBLIC DOMAIN
Once it became clear that the enormous energy contained in the atomic nucleus could be used to build a bomb — and that Nazi Germany might well be doing just that — President Franklin Roosevelt approved a major American effort to beat them to it: the Manhattan Project. It came as a surprise to everyone when Gen. Leslie Groves tapped Robert as director. Seemingly overnight, the ethereal young man who enjoyed reading poetry in Sanskrit became the ringleader of the most concentrated collection of brilliant minds ever assembled — scientists summoned from around the world to a makeshift lab on a desolate New Mexico mesa, where they would build an atomic bomb to stop Hitler.
Frank, meanwhile, worked with Lawrence on what he called “racetracks” (officially calutrons) used to coax small but vital amounts of pure uranium-235 out of a dirty mix of isotopes by steering them in circles with magnets. Uranium-235, like plutonium-239, is easily split, just what was needed to set off a chain reaction. Since no one knew how to bring together a critical mass of the stuff to make an explosion, two designs were pursued simultaneously. The plutonium bomb acquired the nickname Fat Man; the uranium bomb was Little Boy.
Frank helped supervise an enormous complex for uranium separation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Frank liked Gen. Groves and Groves, in turn, liked Frank — and later defended him when he was booted from physics for his politics.
As the time to test the bomb approached, Frank joined his brother at the Trinity site, a dry scrubby desert formerly part of the Alamogordo Bombing Range. Frank, who saw his job (ironically enough) as a “safety inspector,” mapped escape routes through the desert and made sure workers wore hard hats.
Gen. Leslie Groves, center, Robert Oppenheimer, in hat, and others pose next to the remains of the tower destroyed by the testing of the Trinity bomb in a photo dated from September 1945, after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.CREDIT: US DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY / PUBLIC DOMAIN
Finally, on July 16, 1945, the go-ahead was given. After a long night on edge watching driving rain and lightning rage around “the gadget” — a Fat Man-style plutonium bomb perched on a 100-foot-tall tower — the proverbial (and literal) button was pushed.
The brothers lay together at the nearest bunker, five miles away, heads to the ground. Frank later described the “unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple and very awesome … and all the thunder of the blast was bouncing, bouncing back and forth on the cliffs and hills. The echoing went on and on.…” The cloud, he said “just seemed to hang there forever.”
Frank and his brother embraced each other: “I think we just said: ‘It worked.’”
On August 6, 1945, Little Boy was dropped on the pristine city of Hiroshima — which had been deliberately untouched by US bombs, the better to assess the damage. In an instant, the city was all but flattened, people reduced to charred cinders, survivors hobbling around with their skin peeled off and hanging from their bodies like rags. An estimated 140,000 people were killed in the attack and in the months after, according to Japanese authorities.
Frank heard the news outside his brother’s office at Los Alamos. “Up to then I don’t think I’d really thought of all those flattened people,” he said. The US bombing of Nagasaki with Fat Man just days later brought the death toll even higher.
Some physicists saw their success as a moral failure. Still, many — including Frank and Robert — also hoped this new weapon would cause people to see the world differently; they hoped it would ultimately bring about peace. “Those were the days when we all drank one toast only,” Robert said: “‘No more wars.’”
Intolerable weapon
After the war, the brothers’ lives diverged, driven by circumstance, in ways that were painful to both.
Robert was a hero; he mingled easily with the powerful. Famously, he was Einstein’s boss — director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He chaired a committee to advise the government on a new and vastly more powerful type of bomb — the hydrogen bomb. Rather than split atoms, it fused them, using the physics of stars. The H-bomb could be 1,000 times more powerful than Little Boy.
Robert’s committee voted unanimously against developing it. “The extreme dangers to mankind inherent in this proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage that could come from this weapon.” They described it as a “threat to the future of the human race which is intolerable.”
Frank, meanwhile, had joined the physics department at the University of Minnesota, building detectors to catch cosmic rays streaming from space with equipment tethered to balloons he frequently lost but chased gamely through Cuban forests and other remote locations. He was excited about their discovery that the cosmic ray particles were not merely protons, as people had assumed, but the nuclei of many elements — from hydrogen to gold — implying that some were forged in supernova explosions.
At the same time, he was giving speeches “all over the map,” as he put it, trying to educate the public about nuclear bombs, trying to explain what 1,000 times more powerful really meant. He spoke to bankers, civic associations, schools. He argued that so-called “smart” people weren’t all that different from everyone else. The mistrust of the “hoi polloi,” Frank thought, stemmed largely from the tendency of people to credit their own success to a single personal characteristic, which they then “idolize” and use to measure everyone else by the same yardstick.
He believed people would educate themselves if they thought their voices mattered. “All of us have seen, especially during the war, the enormous increase in the competence of people that results from a sense of responsibility,” he said. Building the “racetracks” during the war had required training thousands of people “fresh from farms and woods to operate and repair the weirdest and most complicated equipment.”
Frank Oppenheimer, left, works on one of his cosmic ray detectors, which were carried high into the atmosphere by balloons.CREDIT: COURTESY OF KC COLE
Soon, his physics career was cut short. The FBI had been keeping tabs on both brothers for years, pausing only for the war, when military intelligence took over. Agents followed them everywhere, tapped their phones, planted microphones in their houses.
In 1949, Frank received a summons to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he refused to take the fifth, but also refused to testify about anyone other than himself. He was effectively fired from the University of Minnesota physics department, leaving the chair’s office in tears.
Attempts to find work elsewhere were blocked at every turn, despite support from multiple Nobel laureates, Gen. Groves and even H-bomb enthusiast Edward Teller. Finally, an FBI agent told Frank flat out: If he wanted a job, he had to cooperate. “Then I realized what the wall was.”
Out of options, and having just purchased a ranch to live on “someday,” Frank and Jackie became serious cattle ranchers, learning from neighbors and veterinary manuals. (The FBI was right on their tails, pestering neighbors for information, suggesting they were broadcasting atomic secrets to Mexico.) All the while, Frank thought and wrote about physics and peace, civil rights, ethics, education and the critical role of honesty in science and public life.
Robert did not approve of any of Frank’s activities. He thought there wasn’t time to bring the public in on the debate; he thought he could use his fame and power to influence policy in Washington toward peaceful ends. Frank expressed his disgust at what he considered his brother’s futile and elitist approach. Robert made it clear that he thought the idea of becoming a rancher was a little silly — as well as beneath Frank.
Frank felt he could no longer reach him. “I saw my bro in Chicago,” Frank wrote his best friend Robert Wilson at Cornell in an undated letter probably from the early 1950s. “I fear that I merely amused him slightly when, in brotherly love, I told him that I was still confident that someday he would do something that I was proud of.”
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A man destroyed
Robert’s now-famous downfall was swift. Many great books have been written about the subject (not to mention Christopher Nolan’s colossal film); in effect, he was punished for his opposition to the H-bomb, probably his arrogance and naivete as well. After a series of secret hearings, his security clearance was revoked; he was, by all accounts, a ruined man.
It wasn’t something Frank liked to talk about. “He trusted his ability to talk to people and convince them,” Frank said. “But he was up against people that weren’t used to being convinced by conversation.”
Some of Robert’s most poignant testimony during the hearings involved Frank. Asked if his brother had ever been a Communist, Robert answered: “Mr. Chairman … I ask you not to press these questions about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I will answer, if asked, but I beg of you not to ask me these questions.”
The broader tragedy for both brothers was that the creation of the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction — a thing too horrible ever to use — didn’t much change how people viewed war. The H-bomb was just another weapon.
“What undid him,” Frank said, “was not just his fall from official grace, but the fact that this fall represented a defeat for the kind of civilized behavior that he had hoped nations would adopt.”
Robert died at the age of 62, in 1967. Frank’s last memory of his brother is poignantly familial. Robert was lying in bed, in great pain from throat cancer. Frank lay down beside him and together they watched Perry Mason on TV.
A new path
While Robert was being politically destroyed, Frank had started teaching science in a one-room schoolhouse. Before long, students from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, were winning the state science fairs. Eventually allowed into academia by the University of Colorado in 1959, Frank promptly built a “library of experiments” out of equipment scavenged from other labs.
That “library” in time grew into a vast public playground of scientific stuff housed in the abandoned Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Exhibits — sometimes sophisticated and delicate — were meant to be played with, even broken; no guards stopped people from touching anything, no rules prevented theft — and remarkably, there was almost none. He called it an Exploratorium so people wouldn’t think it was a “museum” where good behavior was expected (although he liked the idea that “no one flunks a museum”). Top scientists and artists from around the globe contributed time and talent. Barbara Gamow, wife of the physicist George Gamow, painted a sign to hang over the machine shop: Here is Being Created an Exploratorium, a Community Museum Dedicated to Awareness.
Frank Oppenheimer stands at his Pendulum Table exhibit at the Exploratorium.CREDIT: COURTESY OF KC COLE
In the end, I like to think Frank proved his brother (and most everyone else) wrong about the willingness of everyday people to engage and learn. The “so-called inattentive public,” he’d said, would come to life if people didn’t feel “fooled and lied to,” if they felt valued and respected. And if people got addicted to figuring things out for themselves, they’d be inoculated against having to take the word of whatever bullies happened to be in power. Society could tap into this collective wisdom to solve pressing global problems — the only way he thought it could work.
Today, Exploratorium-style science centers exist in some form all over the globe.
I count myself as one of Frank’s many thousands of addicts, hooked on science (a subject I’d found boring) the minute I met him in 1971. (In a weird resonance with today, my first foray into journalism was a piece on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia for the New York Times Magazine.) I was interested in peace, not physics. Frank talked me into writing for him, explaining optics and wave mechanics to the public. My first editor was Jackie. Over the years, Frank and I spent endless hours chatting about life, art, science and his family, including his brother.
Nolan’s film Oppenheimer doesn’t offer much insight into Robert’s thoughts on science and peace or science and human morality. However, Robert did think and talk about these ideas, many of which are collected in his 1954 book Science and the Common Understanding, as well as other places.
Frank continued to get upset (and a little drunk) every August 6, the day Hiroshima was bombed. He’d rub his forehead hard, as if he was trying to rub something out. He had much the same reaction to many previous dramatizations of the Oppenheimer story, because he thought they focused too much on the fall of his brother, rather than on the failure of attempts to use the horror of the bomb to build a warless world.
Frank’s fierce integrity permeated our work together: He refused to call me writer/editor because he said that meant writer divided by editor. Instead, I was his Exploratorium Expositor.
If someone said, “It’s impossible to know something, or impossible to adequately thank someone,” he’d argue: It’s not impossible, it’s only very, very, very hard.
No matter what impossible thing Frank was trying to do, he refused to be stopped by so-called “real world” obstacles. “It’s not the real world,” he’d rage. “It’s a world we made up.” We could do better. In fact, so many of what we came to call “Frankisms” seem more relevant today than ever:
“The worst thing a son of a bitch can do to you is turn you into a son of a bitch.”
“Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society.”
“If we stop trying to understand things, we’ll all be sunk.”
Navigating the dark side of science, I think, will require attending closely to all of these. The “real world” we’re presented with is not the way things have to be. We shouldn’t become sons of bitches. We can never stop noticing or trying to understand.
10.1146/knowable-030424-1
KC Coleis the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up. She is senior senior correspondent at Wired magazine, teaches in the honors program at the University of Washington, and has written for dozens of newspapers and magazines.
This is a story about a traveler in the middle ages who happened upon a large work site in the center of a village. He had been traveling for many days, and he was eager to talk to anyone who would engage with him.
He walked up to a worker at the site and asked, “Sir, may I ask what you are doing?”
The worker scowled a bit and said tersely, “I am cutting stones.”
The traveler decided he would find little conversation there, so he moved on to another worker. When he asked the same question, the worker paused for a moment and explained that he was cutting stones so he could support his family. He had a wonderful wife and two small children who depended on him to provide them with food and shelter. They chatted about the project and the village for a few minutes, and the worker turned back to his large pile of stones.
The traveler moved to a third worker and asked the same question: “Sir, may I ask what you are doing?”
The worker put down his tools, stood quite tall, looked the traveler in the eye and said with a warm smile, “I am building a cathedral. It will be the tallest and most magnificent structure for miles around. Its beauty will delight people for centuries to come. The stone I am now working on will go near the front door where people will enter for shelter and kinship. I will probably not see the final product, but I know my work is part of something very important.”
Author Unknown
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
In May 1911, Thomas Mann checked into the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido in Venice with his brother Heinrich and his wife Katia. There, he was famously inspired to write what would become perhaps his most widely read work, the novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), in which a severe writer in his 50s, Gustav von Aschenbach (based in some ways on Gustav Mahler), travels to the same hotel and develops an obsession with a young boy, soon becoming unrecognizable to himself, as the threat of cholera creeps over the city.
In her memoir Unwritten Memories, Katia Mann remembered their own arrival at the Grand Hotel des Bains:
“It was very crowded, and in the dining room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them [in the novella]: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband’s attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn’t pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn’t do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often.”
But the trip gave Mann more than just Tadzio to work with. “Nothing in Death in Venice is invented,” Mann himself wrote in A Sketch of My Life. “The traveller by the Northern Cemetery in Munich, the gloomy boat from Pola, the aged fop, the dubious gondolier, Tadzio and his family, the departure prevented by a mix-up over luggage, the cholera, the honest clerk in the travel agency, the malevolent street singer, or whatever else you might care to mention—everything was given.”
“Everything was based on reality, even down to the details,” Katia added, “but no one besides Thomas Mann would have been able to make them into Death in Venice. My husband transferred to Aschenbach the pleasure he actually took in this charming boy, stylizing it into extreme passion.”
Death in Venice was published the next year, in 1912, and first translated into English in 1924.
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