Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988; IPA: /ˈfaɪnmən/) was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum
electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. For his work on quantum
electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro
Tomonaga; he developed a widely-used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the
behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams.
He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that
investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his
work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum
computing,[1] and introducing the concept of
nanotechnology (creation of devices at the molecular scale).[2] He held the Richard Chace Tolman
professorship in theoretical physics at
Caltech.
Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics in both his books and lectures, notably a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology
called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and
The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman is also known for his
semi-autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and
through books about him, such as Tuva or Bust!. He was also known as a
prankster, a proud amateur painter, and a bongo player. Richard Feynman was regarded as an eccentric and a free
spirit. He liked to pursue multiple seemingly independent paths, such as biology, art, percussion, Maya hieroglyphs, and lock picking. Freeman Dyson once wrote that Feynman was "half-genius, half-buffoon", but later revised this to
"all-genius, all-buffoon".[3]. During his time and after
his death, Feynman became one of the most publicly known scientists in the world.
Biography
Richard Phillips Feynman was born on May 11, 1918,[4] in Far
Rockaway, Queens, New York.[5] His
family was Jewish and, while not ritualistic in their practice of Judaism, his parents attended synagogue every Friday. Feynman (in common with other famous physicists,
Edward Teller and Albert Einstein) was a
late talker; by his third birthday he had yet to utter a single word. The young Feynman
was heavily influenced by his father, Melville, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking. From his
mother, Lucille, he gained the sense of humor that endured throughout his life. As a child, he delighted in repairing radios and
had a talent for engineering. His sister Joan also
became a professional physicist.[6]
Education
In high school he was bright, with a measured IQ of 123:[7] high, but "merely respectable" according to
biographer Gleick.[7] He would later scoff at psychometric testing. By 15, he had mastered differential and integral calculus. Before entering
college, he was experimenting with and re-creating mathematical topics, such as the half-derivative, utilizing his own notation. Thus, while in high school, he was developing the
mathematical intuition behind his Taylor series of mathematical
operators. His habit of direct characterization would sometimes disconcert more conventional thinkers; for example, one of
his questions when learning feline anatomy was: "Do you have a map of the cat?" (referring to an anatomical chart).
Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, a school that also produced
fellow laureates Burton Richter and Baruch
Samuel Blumberg.[8] A member of the Arista Honor
Society, in his last year in high school, Feynman won the New York University Math Championship; the large difference between his
score and his closest runners-up shocked the judges.[9] He
applied to Columbia University; however, because he was Jewish, and Columbia still
had a quota for Jews, he was not accepted.[10] Instead he
attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he
received a bachelor's degree in 1939, and in the same year was named a
Putnam Fellow. While there, Feynman took every physics
course offered, including a graduate course on theoretical physics while only in his
second year. He obtained a perfect score on the entrance exams to Princeton
University in mathematics and physics — an unprecedented feat — but did rather poorly on the history and English portions.
Attendees at Feynman's first seminar included the luminaries Albert Einstein,
Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann. He
received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1942; his thesis advisor was
John Archibald Wheeler. Feynman's thesis applied the principle of stationary action to problems of quantum mechanics, laying the ground work for
the "path integral" approach and Feynman diagrams.
This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was no physicist on earth who could match
his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had
become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler-Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a
frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the
same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others.
– James Gleick , Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
While researching his PhD, Feynman married his first wife, Arline Greenbaum. (Arline's name is
often spelled Arlene). Arline was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a terminal illness at
that time, but she and Feynman were careful, and he never contracted the disease.
The Manhattan Project
At Princeton, the physicist Robert R. Wilson encouraged Feynman to participate in
the Manhattan Project—the wartime U.S.
Army project at Los Alamos developing the atomic bomb. Feynman said he was persuaded to join this effort to build it before Nazi Germany. He was assigned to Hans Bethe's theoretical division, and
impressed Bethe enough to be made a group leader. Together with Bethe, he developed the Bethe-Feynman formula for calculating the
yield of a fission bomb, which built upon previous work by Robert Serber. Until his wife's
death on June 16, 1945, he visited her in a sanatorium in Albuquerque each weekend. He immersed himself
in work on the project, and was present at the Trinity bomb test. Feynman claimed to be the
only person to see the explosion without the very dark glasses provided, reasoning that it was safe to look through a truck
windshield, as it would screen out the harmful ultraviolet radiation.
As a junior physicist, he was not central to the project. The greater part of his work was administering the computation group
of human computers in the Theoretical division (one of his students there,
John G. Kemeny, would later go on to co-write the computer language BASIC). Later, with Nicholas Metropolis, he assisted in establishing
the system for using IBM punch cards for computation. Feynman
succeeded in solving one of the equations for the project that were posted on the blackboards. However, they did not "do the
physics right" and Feynman's solution was not used in the project.
Feynman's other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the
Los Alamos "Water Boiler", a small nuclear reactor, to measure how close an
assembly of fissile material was to criticality. On completing this work he was transferred to the Oak Ridge facility, where he aided engineers in calculating safety procedures for material
storage, so that inadvertent criticality accidents (for example, storing
subcritical amounts of fissile material in proximity on opposite sides of a wall) could be avoided. He also did theoretical work
and calculations on the proposed uranium-hydride bomb, which later proved to be
infeasible.
Feynman was sought out by physicist Niels Bohr for one-on-one discussions. He later
discovered the reason: most physicists were too in awe of Bohr to argue with him. Feynman had no such inhibitions, vigorously
pointing out anything he considered to be flawed in Bohr's thinking. Feynman said he felt as much respect for Bohr as anyone
else, but once anyone got him talking about physics, he would forget about anything else.
Due to the top secret nature of the work, Los Alamos was isolated. In his own words, "There wasn't anything to do
there". Bored, Feynman indulged his curiosity by learning to pick the combination locks on cabinets and desks used to secure
papers. Feynman played many jokes on colleagues. In one case he found the combination to a locked filing cabinet by trying the
numbers a physicist would use (it proved to be 27-18-28 after the base of natural
logarithms, e = 2.71828...), and found that the three filing
cabinets where a colleague kept a set of atomic bomb research notes all had the same
combination. He left a series of notes as a prank, which initially spooked his colleague into thinking a spy or saboteur had
gained access to atomic bomb secrets (coincidentally, Feynman once borrowed the car of physicist Klaus Fuchs who was later discovered to be a spy for the Soviets).
On occasion, Feynman would find an isolated section of the mesa to drum in the style of
American natives; "and maybe I would dance and chant, a little".
These antics did not go unnoticed, and rumors spread about a mysterious Indian drummer called "Injun Joe". He also became a
friend of laboratory head J. Robert Oppenheimer, who unsuccessfully tried to court
him away from his other commitments to work at the University of California,
Berkeley after the war.
Feynman alludes to his thoughts on the justification for getting involved in the Manhattan project in "The pleasure of finding things out." As mentioned earlier, he felt the possibility of Nazi Germany developing
the bomb before the Allies was a compelling reason to help with its development for the U.S. However, he goes on to say that it
was an error on his part not to reconsider the situation when Germany was defeated. In the same publication Feynman also talks
about his worries in the atomic bomb age, feeling for some considerable time that there was a high risk that the bomb would be
used again soon so that it was pointless to, for example, build for the future. Later he describes this period as a
'depression.'
Early career
After the project concluded, Feynman began work as a professor at Cornell
University, where Hans Bethe (who proved that the sun's source of energy was
nuclear fusion) worked. However, he felt uninspired there; despairing that he had burned
out, he turned to less useful, but fun problems, such as analyzing the physics of a twirling, nutating dish, as it is being balanced by a juggler. (As it turned out, this work served him well in future
research.) He was therefore surprised to be offered professorships from competing universities, eventually choosing to work at
the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, California, despite being offered a position near Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced
Study (which included such distinguished faculty members as Albert Einstein).
Feynman rejected the Institute on the grounds that there were no teaching duties. Feynman found his students to be a source of
inspiration and, during uncreative times, comfort. He felt that if he could not be creative, at least he could teach. Another
major factor in his decision was a desire to live in a mild climate, a goal he chose while having to put snow chains on his car's
wheels in the middle of a snowstorm in Ithaca, New York.
Feynman has been called the "Great Explainer"; he gained a reputation for taking great care when giving explanations to his
students, and for assigning himself a moral duty to make the topic accessible. His principle was that if a topic could not be
explained in a freshman lecture, it was not yet fully understood. Feynman gained great
pleasure[11] from coming up with such a "freshman level"
explanation of the connection between spin and statistics (that groups of particles with
spin 1/2 "repel", whereas groups with integer spin "clump", i.e., Fermi-Dirac
statistics and Bose-Einstein statistics as consequence of how
fermions and bosons behave under a rotation of 360°), a question
he pondered in his own lectures and to which he demonstrated the solution in the 1986 Dirac memorial lecture.[12] In the same lecture he explained that antiparticles exist since if
particles only had positive energies they would not be restricted to a light cone. He opposed
rote learning and other teaching methods that emphasized form over function, everywhere
from a conference on education in Brazil to a state commission on school textbook selection. Clear thinking and clear
presentation were fundamental prerequisites for his attention. It could be perilous to even approach him when unprepared, and
he did not forget the fools or pretenders.[13]
During one sabbatical year, he returned to Newton's Principia Mathematica
to study it anew; what he learned from Newton, he passed along to his students, such as Newton's attempted explanation of
diffraction.
The Caltech years
Feynman did significant work while at Caltech, including research in:
- Physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a lack of viscosity when flowing.
Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was
displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped with the problem of superconductivity; however, the solution eluded Feynman. It was solved with the BCS theory.
He also developed Feynman diagrams, a bookkeeping device which helps in
conceptualizing and calculating interactions between particles in spacetime, notably the interactions between electrons and their antimatter
counterparts, positrons. This device allowed him, and later others, to approach time
reversibility and other fundamental processes. Feynman famously painted Feynman diagrams on the exterior of his van.
Feynman diagrams are now fundamental for string theory and M-theory, and have even been extended topologically. Feynman's mental picture for these diagrams started with
the hard sphere approximation, and the interactions could be thought of as collisions at first. It was not until
decades later that physicists thought of analyzing the nodes of the Feynman diagrams more closely. The world-lines of the
diagrams have developed to become tubes to allow better modelling of more complicated objects such as strings and
M-branes.
From his diagrams of a small number of particles interacting in spacetime, Feynman could
then model all of physics in terms of those particles' spins and the range of coupling of the fundamental
forces.[17] Feynman attempted an explanation of
the strong interactions governing nucleons scattering called the parton model. The parton model emerged as a rival to the quark
model developed by his Caltech colleague Murray Gell-Mann. The relationship between the
two models was murky; Gell-Mann referred to Feynman's partons derisively as "put-ons". Feynman did not dispute the quark model;
for example, when the fifth quark was discovered, Feynman immediately pointed out to his students that the discovery implied the
existence of a sixth quark, which was duly discovered in the decade after his death.
After the success of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman turned to quantum gravity. By
analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field, and was able to
derive the Einstein field equation of general relativity, but little
more.[18] However, a calculational technique that Feynman
developed for gravity in 1962 — "ghosts" — later proved invaluable for explaining the quantum theory of the weak and strong
forces, the other two fundamental interactions in nature. In 1967, Fadeev and Popov quantized the particle behaviour of the spin
1 theories of Yang-Mills -Shaw -Pauli, that are now seen to describe the weak and strong interactions, using Feynman's path
integral technique but including also Feynman's "ghost" particles to conserve probability.
At this time, in the early 1960s Feynman exhausted himself by working on multiple major projects at the same time, including
his Feynman Lectures on Physics: while at Caltech, Feynman was
asked to "spruce up" the teaching of undergraduates. After three years devoted to the task, he produced a series of lectures that
would eventually become the Feynman Lectures on Physics, one
reason that Feynman is still regarded as one of the greatest teachers of physics. He wanted a picture of a drumhead
sprinkled with powder to show the modes of vibration at the beginning of the book. Outraged by many Rock and Roll and drug
connections that one could make from the image, the publishers changed the cover to a picture of him playing drums. Feynman later
won the Oersted Medal for teaching, of which he seemed especially proud.[19] His students competed keenly for his attention; he was once
awakened when a student solved a problem and dropped it in his mailbox; glimpsing the student sneaking across his lawn, he could
not go back to sleep, and he read the student's solution. The next morning his breakfast was interrupted by another triumphant
student, but Feynman informed him that he was too late.
Partly as a way to bring publicity to progress in physics, Feynman offered $1000 prizes for two of his challenges in
nanotechnology, claimed by William McLellan and Tom Newman, respectively.[20] He was also one of the first scientists to conceive the possibility of quantum computers. Many of his lectures and other miscellaneous talks were turned into books, including
The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory
of Light and Matter. He gave lectures which his students annotated into books, such as Statistical Mechanics
and Lectures on Gravity. The Feynman Lectures on
Physics[21] required two physicists,
Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands as
full-time editors for several years. Even though they were not adopted by the universities as textbooks, the books continue to be
bestsellers because they provide a deep understanding of physics. As of 2005, The Feynman Lectures on Physics have sold
over 1.5 million copies in English, an estimated 1 million copies in Russian, and an estimated half million copies in other
languages.
In 1974 Feynman delivered the Caltech commencement address on the topic of cargo cult
science, which has the semblance of science but is only pseudoscience due to a lack
of "a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty" on the part of
the scientist. He instructed the graduating class that "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the
easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that."[22]
In the late 1970s, according to "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine",
Feynman played a critical role in developing the first parallel processing computer
and finding innovative uses for it in numerical computing and building neural networks,
as well as physical simulation with cellular automata (such as turbulent fluid flow),
working with Stephen Wolfram at Caltech.[23]
Shortly before his death, Feynman criticized string theory in an interview: "I don't
like that they're not calculating anything," he said. "I don't like that they don't check their ideas. I don't like that for
anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, 'Well, it still might be true.'" These
words have since been much-quoted by opponents of the string-theoretic direction for particle physics.
Personal life
He was married a second time in June 1952, to Mary Louise Bell of Neodesha, Kansas;
this marriage was brief and unsuccessful. He later married Gweneth Howarth from the United
Kingdom, who shared his enthusiasm for life and spirited adventure. Besides their home in Altadena, California, they had a beach house in Baja
California, the latter of which was purchased with the prize money from Feynman's Nobel Prize, at that time $55,000 (of
which Feynman was entitled to a third). They remained married until Feynman's death. They had a son, Carl, in 1962, and adopted a daughter, Michelle, in 1968.[24]
Feynman had a great deal of success teaching Carl using discussions about ants and Martians as a device for
gaining perspective on problems and issues; he was surprised to learn that the same teaching devices were not useful with
Michelle. Mathematics was a common interest for father and son; they both entered the computer field as consultants and were
involved in advancing a new method of using multiple computers to solve complex problems—later known as parallel computing. The
Jet Propulsion Laboratory retained Feynman as a computational consultant
during critical missions. One coworker characterized Feynman as akin to Don Quixote
at his desk, rather than at a computer workstation, ready to do battle with the windmills.
According to his colleague, Professor Steven Frautschi, Feynman was the only person in the Altadena region to buy
flood insurance after the massive 1978 fire, predicting correctly that the fire's
destruction would lead to land erosion, causing mudslides and flooding. The flood occurred in 1979 after winter rains and
destroyed multiple houses in the neighborhood. Feynman's use of insurance, an inherently future-looking device, was not only
fortunate but ironic in light of his depiction of his outlook following the Manhattan Project. Feynman wrote that in the years
following the development and use of the atomic bomb, whenever seeing the construction of a bridge or a new building, he was
unavoidably struck by the thought that the labor was futile and in vain, as the human race would soon be undone by the bomb.
Feynman traveled a great deal, notably to Brazil, and near the end of his life schemed to visit the Russian land of
Tuva, a dream that, due to Cold War bureaucratic problems, never
became reality.[25] Ironically, the day after he died, a
letter arrived for him from the Soviet government giving him authorization to travel to Tuva. During this period he discovered
that he had a form of cancer, but, thanks to surgery, he managed to hold it off. Out of his enthusiastic interest in reaching
Tuva came the phrase "Tuva or Bust" (also the title of a book about his efforts to get
there), which was tossed about frequently amongst his circle of friends in hope that they, one day, could see it firsthand. The
documentary movie Genghis Blues mentions some of his attempts to communicate with
Tuva and chronicles the journey when some of his friends did make it there. His attempts to circumvent the complex Soviet
bureaucratic system which kept Tuva sealed, and also his attempts to write and send a letter using an English-Russian and
Russian-Tuvan dictionary, as well as his earlier efforts to translate Mayan hieroglyphics,
all demonstrate his life-long addiction to solving puzzles, locks, and cyphers. At the time, they also earned him a reputation of
eccentricity.
Feynman did not work only on physics, and had a large circle of friends from all walks of life, including the arts. He took up
drawing at one time and enjoyed some success under the pseudonym "Ofey", culminating in an
exhibition dedicated to his work. He learned to play drums (frigideira) in a
samba style in Brazil by dint of persistence and practice, and participated in a samba school. Apparently Feynman did not much appreciate orchestral music, but he had a keen sense of
rhythm and timing which extended to a personal timekeeping center in his brain which let him operate without ever needing a
watch. In addition, he had some degree of synesthesia for numbers and equations, explaining
that certain mathematic functions appeared in color for him, even though invariably actually printed in standard
black-and-white.
According to Genius, the James Gleick biography, Richard Feynman experimented
with LSD during his professorship at Caltech.[7] Somewhat embarrassed by his actions, Feynman sidestepped the issue when dictating his anecdotes;
consequently, the "Altered States" chapter in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! describes only marijuana and ketamine experiences at John Lilly's famed sensory deprivation tanks, as a way of studying
consciousness. Feynman gave up alcohol when he began to show early signs of alcoholism, as he did not want to do anything that
could damage his brain.
In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar. At Caltech,
he used a nude/topless bar as an office away from his usual office, making sketches or writing physics equations on paper
placemats. When the county officials tried to close the locale, all visitors except Feynman refused to testify in favor of the
bar, fearing that their families or patrons would learn about their visits. Only Feynman accepted, and in court, he affirmed that
the bar was a public need, stating that craftsmen, technicians, engineers, common workers "and a physics professor" frequented
the establishment. While the bar lost the court case, it was allowed to remain open as a similar case was pending appeal.
Challenger disaster
Feynman served on the presidential commission investigating the 1986
Challenger
disaster. He concluded that NASA management's space shuttle reliability estimate was
fantastically unrealistic. He warned in his appendix to the commission's report: "
For a successful technology, reality must
take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
Feynman was requested to serve on the Presidential Rogers Commission which
investigated the Challenger disaster of 1986. Feynman devoted
the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People
Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted
anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman's account reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and
executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling
misunderstandings of elementary concepts.
In one example, early tests resulted in some of the booster rocket's o-rings burning a third
of the way through. These o-rings provided the gas-tight seal needed between the vertically stacked cylindical sections that made
up the solid fuel booster. NASA managers recorded this result as demonstrating that the o-rings had a "safety factor" of 3.
Feynman incredulously explains the magnitude of this error: a "safety factor" refers to the practice of building an object to be
capable of withstanding more force than it will ever conceivably be subjected to. To paraphrase Feynman's example, if engineers
built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds
in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If, however, a truck drove across the bridge and it cracked at all, the safety factor
is now zero: the bridge is defective.
Feynman was clearly disturbed by the fact that NASA management not only misunderstood this concept, but in fact inverted it by
using a term denoting an extra level of safety to describe a part that was actually defective and unsafe. Feynman continued to
investigate the lack of communication between NASA's management and its engineers and was struck by the management's claim that
the risk of catastrophic malfunction on the shuttle was 1 in 105; i.e., 1 in 100,000. Feynman immediately realized
that this claim was risible on its face; as he
described, this assessment of risk would entail that we could launch a shuttle every day for the next 274 years without an
accident. Investigating the claim further, Feynman discovered that the 1 in 105 figure was reached by the highly
dubious method of attempting to calculate the probability of failure of every individual part of the shuttle, and then adding
these estimates together. This method is erroneous by standard probability theory: the correct way to calculate such risk is to
subtract each individual factor's failure risk from unity and then multiply all differences. The product will be the net safety
factor and the difference between it and unity, the net risk factor.
Feynman was disturbed by two aspects of this practice. First, NASA management assigned a probability of failure to each
individual bolt, sometimes claiming a probability of 1 in 108; that is, one in one hundred million. Feynman pointed
out that it is impossible to calculate such a remote possibility with any scientific rigor. Secondly, Feynman was bothered not
just by this sloppy science but by the fact that NASA claimed that the risk of catastrophic failure was "necessarily" 1 in
105. As the figure itself was beyond belief, Feynman questioned exactly what "necessarily" meant in this context—did
it mean that the figure followed logically from other calculations, or did it reflect NASA management's desire to make the
numbers fit?
Feynman suspected that the 1/100,000 figure was wildly fantastical, and made a rough estimate that the true likelihood of
shuttle disaster was closer to 1 in 100. He then decided to poll the engineers themselves, asking them to write down an anonymous
estimate of the odds of shuttle explosion. Feynman found that the bulk of the engineers' estimates fell between 1 in 50 and 1 in
100. Not only did this confirm that NASA management had clearly failed to communicate with their own engineers, but the disparity
engaged Feynman's emotions. When describing these wildly differing estimates, Feynman briefly lapses from his damaging but
dispassionate detailing of NASA's flaws to recognize the moral failing that resulted from a scientific failing: he was clearly
upset that NASA presented its clearly fantastical figures as fact to convince a member of the public, schoolteacher
Christa McAuliffe, to join the crew. Feynman was not uncomfortable with the concept of
a 1/100 risk, but felt strongly that the recruitment of laypeople required an honest portrayal of the real risk involved.
Feynman's investigation eventually suggested to him that the cause of the Challenger explosion was the very part to
which NASA management so mistakenly assigned a safety factor. The o-rings were rubber rings designed to form a seal in the
shuttle's solid rocket boosters, preventing the rockets' super-heated gas from escaping and damaging other parts of the vehicle.
Feynman suspected that despite NASA's claims, the o-rings were unsuitable at low temperatures and lost their resilience when
cold, thus failing to expand and maintain a tight seal when rocket pressure distorted the structure of the solid fuel booster.
Feynman's suspicions were corroborated by General Kutyna also on the commission who
cunningly provided Feynman with a broad hint by asking about the effect of cold on o-ring seals after mentioning that the
temperature on the day of the launch was far lower than had been the case with previous launches: below freezing at 28 or 29
Fahrenheit (-2.2 to -1.6 °C); previously, the
coldest launch had been at 53 °F (12 °C).
Feynman obtained samples of the seals used on the Challenger by dismantling a model supplied to the commission intending to
test the resilience of the seals at low temperature in front of the TV cameras, but in an act that he claims to have been ashamed
of, ran the test first in private to ensure that it was indeed the case that low temperature reduced the resilience of the rubber
as he suspected.
When testifying before Congress, Feynman questioned a NASA manager with seeming innocence, focusing on the cold temperatures
that the o-rings could be subjected to while remaining resilient (i.e., effective). The NASA manager insisted that o-rings would
retain their resilience even in extreme cold. But Feynman managed to obtain a glass of iced water, and used it to cool a section
of o-ring seal clamped flat with a small clamp he had purchased earlier at a hardware store.
After receiving repeated assurances that the o-rings would remain resilient at subzero temperatures, and at an opportune
moment selected by Kutyna during a particular NASA slide-show, Feynman took the o-ring out of the water and removed the vise,
revealing that the o-ring remained flattened, demonstrating a lack of resilience at 32 °F (0 °C), warmer than the launch
temperature.[26] While Feynman worried that the audience
did not realize the importance of his action, The New York Times picked the
story up, crediting Feynman for his ruse, and earning him a small measure of fame.
Feynman's investigations also revealed that there had been many serious doubts raised about the o-ring seals by engineers at
Morton Thiokol, which made the solid fuel boosters, but communication failures had led to their
concerns being ignored by NASA management. He found similar failures in procedure in many other areas at NASA, but singled out
its software development for praise due to its rigorous and highly effective quality procedures which were under threat from NASA
management which wished to reduce testing to save money since the tests were always passed.
Based on his experiences with NASA's management and engineers, Feynman concluded that the serious deficiencies in NASA management's scientific understanding, the
lack of communication between the two camps, and the gross misrepresentation of the
shuttle's dangers required that NASA take a hiatus from shuttle launches until it could resolve its internal inconsistencies and
present an honest picture of the shuttle's reliability. Feynman soon found that, while he
respected the intellects of his fellow Commission members, they universally finished their criticisms of NASA with clear affirmations that the
Challenger disaster should be addressed by NASA internally, but that there was no need for NASA to suspend its
operations or to receive less funding. Feynman felt that the Commission's conclusions were not
compatible with its findings, and could not in good conscience recommend that such a deeply
flawed organization should continue without a suspension of
operations and a major overhaul. His fellow commission members were alarmed by Feynman's
dissension, and it was only after much petitioning that Feynman's minority report was included at all: as an appendix to the
official document. Feynman's book What Do You Care What Other People Think? included a copyedited version of the appendix in addition to his narrative account.
It was announced in May 2006 that a movie would be made about the disaster. Challenger is to be directed by Philip Kaufman—whose 1983
film The Right Stuff chronicled the early history of the space program—and would
focus on the role of Feynman in the ensuing investigation. David Strathairn will play
Dr. Feynman.[27]
Commemorations
