The Frontier

Richard Feynman served on the presidential Rogers Commission investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster, suspecting it would be a political whitewash. He famously demonstrated O-ring failure in ice water during a public hearing.

NASA management estimated shuttle disaster risk at 1 in 100,000, which Feynman called absurd. The project engineers privately estimated the risk at 1 in 100.

Feynman concluded the Challenger exploded due to O-ring seal failure in the cold launch weather. His appendix to the final report stated that for successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations.

As a graduate student, Feynman was recruited for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He described the culture as democratic, where anyone could critique bad ideas regardless of hierarchy.

Feynman was deeply affected by the atomic bomb's use and his wife Arlene's death from tuberculosis during the war. He later experienced a period of depression, believing further scientific work was pointless.

His scientific curiosity was reignited at Cornell by observing a spinning plate's wobble in a cafeteria. This playful investigation into a seemingly trivial problem later contributed to his Nobel Prize-winning work on quantum electrodynamics.

Feynman's problem-solving ethos involved rebuilding understanding from first principles. He often asked basic questions to expose flaws in complex theories, a method colleagues found both effective and occasionally frustrating.

He co-authored the bestselling anecdotal books 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' (1985) and 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' (1988) with Ralph Leighton. The stories originated from their drumming sessions.

Feynman argued that knowing the name of something is not the same as understanding it. He illustrated this with his father's lesson about a bird's name in multiple languages revealing nothing about the bird itself.

He viewed the beauty of a flower as enhanced by scientific understanding of its cellular structure and evolutionary processes, not diminished by it. This countered an artist friend's view that analysis destroyed beauty.

Feynman held the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics chair at Caltech. He influenced a generation of physicists, including John Preskill who was drawn to science by a childhood book based on Feynman's interviews.

After the war, Feynman went to Japan and learned the language, which colleague Ralph Leighton interpreted as part of an atonement for the atomic bomb's use. He was struck by a Buddhist teaching about the same keys opening heaven or hell.