Experience the Exploratorium. Let your curiosity roam free through hundreds of exhibits in our six spacious indoor and outdoor galleries at Pier 15, San Francisco.

Here at the Exploratorium, you don’t look at exhibits—you play with them. Dance with your own shadow, levitate, touch a tornado, mix colors and break light apart, stop time, start a conversation, ...

Here’s a cow’s eye from the meat company. The white part is the sclera, the outer covering of the eyeball. The blue is the cornea, which starts out clear but becomes cloudy after death.

Try a new tilt on eclipses. Why doesn’t a solar or lunar eclipse happen every month? It’s because the moon’s orbit around the earth is tilted in relation to the earth’s orbit around the Sun. In this ...

Answers to questions about COVID safety, planning your visit, accessibility, food and more at the Exploratorium's beautiful bayside location at Pier 15, San Francisco.

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 ...

A compass allows us to observe the direction of a magnetic field: compass needles are just little magnets that are free to rotate. Normally, compasses respond to Earth’s magnetic field, orienting ...

Kazoos and drums are membranophones—instruments that produce sound from a vibrating stretched membrane. Here, a water bottle and a paper tube make a membranophone that sounds like a saxophone crossed ...

Photosynthesis requires light, but plants don’t use all the colors that make up white light. Use a spectroscope to explore the absorption and transmission of white light through leaf material.

Fill in your birthdate below in the space indicated. (Note you must enter the year as a 4-digit number!) Click on the "Calculate" button. Notice that your age on other worlds will automatically fill ...

This simple paper toy spins through the air like a mini-helicopter ...

One of the most exciting exercises I ever did as a kid was to make a scale model of the Solar System. Most of the pictures in my books made the distance between planets seem small and easy to travel.