Website Launches September 1, 2005
www.exploratorium.edu/doctoratomic

On September 1, the Exploratorium broadens its unique collaboration with the San Francisco Opera to probe the history of the making of the first atomic bomb under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The San Francisco museum launches a new website, www.exploratorium.edu/doctoratomic, to provide scientific, historical and cultural context for composer John Adams’s new opera, Doctor Atomic, which premieres October 1 at the San Francisco Opera House.

The Website helps to tell the story by annotating the text of the opera, which librettist Peter Sellars bases on historical documents, science and even poetry. The site explicates big issues: the science of fission, the backdrop of the war leading to the decision to use the bomb, the tension among the scientists about the frightening potential they were creating. It also fills in the lesser-known facts: Security measures dictated that the 330 babies born at Los Alamos be given only a post office box on their birth certificates; the streets where scientists and military personnel lived were nameless and unpaved, and one of the few authorized escapes from behind the fenced community was a tearoom 20 miles away that served as a gathering place for both the scientists and a local tribe of the Pueblo Nation. Then there are insightful details: Robert Oppenheimer, who had once aspired to being a poet, read Baudelaire to calm himself before the testing of the bomb, and in the aftermath of the blast reflected on the Sanskrit passage from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna reveals himself as the Creator and Destroyer.

The Exploratorium has a deep relationship to the events depicted in this opera because it shares their legacy. Physicist Frank Oppenheimer, who founded the museum in 1969, and who also worked on the Manhattan Project, was Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother. During the McCarthy era of the 1950’s, investigations into Frank’s early political affiliations resulted in his losing his university post and ultimately in his inability to work in academia for ten years. This blackballing led to a series of events that culminated in the creation of the Exploratorium, today one of the most influential science education institutions in the world.