The Exploratorium is more than a museum—it’s a gateway to exploring science, art, and human perception with every visit. Let your curiosity roam through more than 700 interactive exhibits in six ...

The Exploratorium is dedicated to expanding access to all by providing free and low-cost admission opportunities throughout the year.

Global Climate Change Explorer: Ice Turn up the heat, and ice will melt. The effect of climate change on the world’s ice is almost that simple. Global temperatures are warming, and that warming is ...

First Contact The eclipse begins at First Contact, the moment the moon first “touches” the edge of the solar disk, approaching it from the right as seen from the Northern Hemisphere. (It doesn’t ...

For a brief moment after the Big Bang, the immense heat created conditions unlike any conditions astrophysicists see in the universe today. While planets and stars today are composed of atoms of ...

It might seem obvious to say that earthquakes do most of their damage by shaking the ground. But groundshaking is actually a complex phenomenon. Engineering the seismic safety of a structure involves ...

Dark-colored materials absorb and emit energy more readily than light-colored materials.

At the Exploratorium, we’re passionate about curiosity-driven learning, science, and art. We create extraordinary exhibits, projects, programs, and events that ignite curiosity and cultivate the ...

Substitution ciphers and decoder rings We use substitution ciphers all the time. (Actually, substitution ciphers could properly be called codes in most cases.) Morse code, shorthand, semaphore, and ...

Global Climate Change Explorer: Oceans and Water The Heart of Our Climate System Oceans are the heart of our planet’s weather and climate systems. Covering more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, oceans ...

Climate models require immense computing power, such as that of the Summit supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It can perform up to 200,000 trillion calculations ...

Projects The Tinkering Studio is primarily an R&D laboratory on the floor of the Exploratorium, but whenever possible we try to share our projects, activities, and developing ideas following an “open ...