Investor's Business Daily, September 27th, 2007
It was just after the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster, and physicist Richard Feynman was among the researchers chosen to investigate it as part of the Rogers Commission.
Once he met with NASA managers, Feynman had questions about some of the shuttle's designs. So he tracked down those he knew had the answers -- the engineers who had worked on the project.
Their opinion? They considered the risk of a shuttle disaster to be much more dangerous than did their managers.
In his minority report to the inquiry, Feynman analyzed the design and challenged NASA management's estimates on the chance of the shuttle's failure.
He asked: "What is the cause of management's fantastic faith in machinery?"
To make his point, he demonstrated the failure of the material used in the gaskets, or O-rings, that ultimately brought down the shuttle.
During a congressional hearing, he left a sample of the gasket in a glass of ice water to simulate the cold temperatures during the launch. When he removed it, the gasket was misshapen. It proved the engineers' concerns right. An embarrassed NASA almost suppressed his report, but Feynman -- thanks in part to his gutsy demonstration -- won its inclusion as an appendix.
Without his doggedness, the cause of the Challenger explosion might not have been uncovered.
It was the crowning event in a spectacular scientific career that began in Los Alamos, N.M., developing the atom bomb, and included a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics.
Feynman (1918-88) was raised in Far Rockaway, N.Y., and his theoretical and practical love of science began early.
Curious about everything, he filled his childhood with experiments. He built light bulb systems complete with homemade fuses, radios and a burglar alarm. Such projects created the occasional accidental fire, but evolved into jobs fixing radios.
By age 12, Feynman had realized his dogged obsession with finishing every project. His description of fixing the radio of a family friend: "If my mother's friend had said, 'Never mind, it's too much work,' I'd have blown my top because I want to beat the damn thing, as long as I've gone this far. ... I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end."
As a student, Feynman explored areas outside of physics. He sat with philosophy students during his graduate days at Princeton University, even if he didn't always appreciate the outcome. Once, he said, discussion wound up "just like it should in all stories about philosophers. It ended up in complete chaos."
As a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feynman answered physics questions for his senior roommates using only knowledge he picked up reading encyclopedias. He mastered calculus by age 15 by studying on his own.
One of his best assets, he said, was his "different box of tools." He relied on his ability to approach problems differently than his colleagues. Even among more established scientists, he didn't hesitate to argue.
He described saying at meetings in Los Alamos "dopey things" to German physicist Hans Bethe such as, "No, no, you're wrong," or "You're crazy," challenging his ideas. The behavior was impetuous.
"But it turns out that's exactly what he needed," Feynman said. "I got a notch up on account of that, and I ended up as a group leader under Bethe, with four other guys under me."
Feynman was 24 at the time.
Later in his career, Feynman taught at the Center for Physical Research in Brazil. In his off-hours, he would play the pandeiro, a type of tambourine, in a samba group.
"I got a kick out of succeeding at something I wasn't supposed to be able to do," he said.
He applied that approach to other interests. Over the course of his career he traded lessons with painters and became an able artist himself, learned Portuguese and taught himself to crack safes.
"Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile," Feynman advised in one of his two memoirs, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" (written with longtime friend Ralph Leighton). A second, follow-up edition, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?," was written after his work on the Challenger.
In Brazil, Feynman kept up his unwavering belief in education.
When asked to give a speech about his experience teaching there, he already knew that his students had a problem. They memorized their course subjects but couldn't apply the data to practical experiments.
Instead of ignoring the problem, Feynman figured a direct approach might spark a change. He addressed a lecture hall full of students and faculty, including the author of the class's textbook.
After extolling the chance he had been given to teach there, he changed tack and bluntly stated, "I couldn't see how anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people pass exams and teach each other to pass exams, but nobody knows anything."
The reaction was surprising. The head of the science education department stood up and agreed with Feynman. Soon, students were standing and planning ways to change the system.
This story originally ran Sept. 5, 2003, on Leaders & Success.
