Feynman on the Challenger inquiry and thinking from the evidence
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.
Anyone assessing organisational risk who wants a documented case of management and technical staff holding incompatible views of the same system.
Chosen by shared topics, the entries that hold them, and the people who recommended both.