The other Oppenheimer

I have not heard of Frank Friedman Oppenheimer before but resd two articles about him this week A Hero of Science, After All (behind a firewall in NYRB) and
In the Exploratorium's distorted room in MindHacks.
The first is a review of the biography Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up by K.C. Cole.Excerpts:
"The physicist Frank Oppenheimer is remembered today, insofar as he is remembered at all, as the younger brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project scientists who built the atomic bomb. Some also recall that Frank was drummed out of academic life for lying about whether he had belonged to the Communist Party yet went on to found the Exploratorium, San Francisco's innovative science museum. But there is far more to his story, as K.C. Cole's able biography makes clear.....
He insisted that the Exploratorium's workshop be located near the entrance and have no walls, so that visitors could see exhibits being built and repaired and "smell the oil from a lathe." "We both agreed that physics was grubby," said Stanford's Wolfgang Panofsky, one of the many major scientists Oppenheimer dragooned into helping him build the Exploratorium:

"It shouldn't be pretty and under glass. The visitor should learn that experiments break, and fail, and you've got to fix it. Shops should be part of the museum. Because that is the way that physics is done. Things break. You fix them. You repair them. You change them. You improve them."
Oppenheimer called the Exploratorium "a kind of woods of natural phenomena," a place where you went more to explore than to have things explained to you. He liked to say that he built it for the same reason that people build parks—because there aren't enough trees around—and insisted that it have no guards and as few rules as possible. Children should be free to run around as they pleased; if they broke something, so what? "The whole point of the Exploratorium," he said,

"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—and if they give it up with the physical world around them, they give it up with the social and political world as well."
.....

Still, when we consider that Robert Oppenheimer's greatest accomplishment was to build a bomb that just about everybody wants there to be fewer of, while his younger brother advanced techniques in science education that almost everybody wants there to be more of, we may wonder which brother will, in the long run, have the more enduring legacy."

The post in MindHacks has a short description of the Exploratorium's 'distorted room' together with a video and some links : "
The San Francisco Exploratorium is the Mind Hacks of science museums - every exhibit is hands on, giving you the chance to experiment with and experience for yourself scientific principles."

Website of the Exploratorium