What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Feynman on the Challenger inquiry and thinking from the evidence
Summary
The second collection of Feynman anecdotes, assembled by Ralph Leighton, differs from the first in containing two substantial sections rather than a sequence of short stories. The first covers his relationship with Arline Greenbaum, his first wife, who developed tuberculosis before their marriage and died while he was at Los Alamos. The title comes from her, and the account of the marriage, the illness and her death is direct and unsentimental. It also includes material about his father, who taught him to distinguish knowing the name of something from knowing something.
The second and longer section covers his service on the Rogers Commission investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster. Feynman documents the investigation as he conducted it, working independently of the commission's process, talking directly to engineers at Morton Thiokol and at Kennedy Space Center rather than to managers, and discovering that engineers had estimated failure probability at around one in a hundred while management stated one in a hundred thousand.
His demonstration with the O-ring in ice water, which showed on television that the material lost resilience at low temperature, is the episode most remembered. His minority report, which the commission attempted to exclude and which was eventually published as an appendix, concludes that reality must take precedence over public relations because nature cannot be fooled.
The Challenger material is the most useful part of either Feynman collection for a business reader, since it documents how an organisation's management and its technical staff held incompatible assessments of risk while the organisation continued to operate.
Key takeaways 8
- Engineers at NASA estimated the probability of catastrophic failure at around one in a hundred while management stated one in a hundred thousand.
- An organisation can operate for years with management and technical staff holding incompatible assessments of risk without either being reconciled.
- Feynman conducted his investigation by talking directly to working engineers rather than to managers, which produced the information the formal process did not.
- Repeated successful flights with a known defect were treated as evidence that the defect was acceptable rather than as accumulating exposure.
- A demonstration that anyone can see, such as the O-ring in ice water, settles a technical question more effectively than any report.
- Reality must take precedence over public relations because nature cannot be fooled, which is the conclusion of his minority report.
- Knowing the name of something is different from knowing something, which Feynman learned from his father and applied throughout his work.
- The commission attempted to exclude his conclusions, which were published only as an appendix after he insisted.
Who should read it
Anyone assessing organisational risk who wants a documented case of management and technical staff holding incompatible views of the same system.
Who recommended it 3 · 2 direct
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