Richard Feynman, who in 1965 won the Nobel Prize in physics, is known to the general public, if he is known, as the member of the commission investigating the Challenger space shuttle accident who figured out what had happened. You can read a brief summary here. When Feynman was asked to be on the commission, his impulse was to run the other direction. He'd have to spend a lot of time in Washington, D.C., which was a long way from his home in California—he was on the physics faculty at Cal Tech, in Pasadena. Moreover, he had always suspected that the space shuttle program was less about science (which he loved) and more about government and public relations (which he despised). He was also 67 years old and ailing with the cancer that would take his life within about a year and a half. In his memoir What Do You Care What Other People Think?, he relates how he decided to join the commission only after his wife told him:
"If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission there will be eleven people—all in a group, going from place to place together—while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it."
I think it's likely that Feynman was attributing to his wife his own thoughts about himself, but in any event, she (or he) was right: he might not have played well with others, but he figured out why the Challenger had crashed.
His whole account of his time on this commission, as related in What Do You Care, makes for pretty enjoyable reading. He was predisposed to despise all the Washington dipshittery, and to some degree his suspicions were confirmed, but he also had some pleasant surprises: for example, he found a friend in fellow commissioner General Donald Kutyna, to whom he was immediately attracted upon observing that after the first commission meeting the general took the subway back to his job at the Pentagon:
I thought, "This guy, I'm gonna get along with him fine: he's dressed so fancy, but inside, he's straight. He's not the kind of general who's looking for his driver and his special car; he goes back to the Pentagon by the Metro." Right away I liked him, and over the course of the commission I found my judgment in this case was excellent.
I was thinking recently of this episode from Feynman's life because it relates to tensions at the intersection of science and politics, a current topic. Feynman was a pain in the arse of William Rogers, the former Nixon cabinet secretary who led the commission. Rogers, a lawyer charged with heading what was essentially an inquiry into a technology failure, had a thankless job, and perhaps no part of it was worse than having to deal with a free-wheeling iconoclast like Feynman who understood much more about the subject matter. Their last mild squabble related to the commission's final report. There was a question about whether Feynman, who had solved the problem, would sign on: the facts of the case reflected poorly on NASA management, and Rogers, but not Feynman, was inclined to accept a conclusion obscuring this fact with bureaucratic language. In the end, Feynman agreed to sign on only if he could write his own report, which was included as an appendix to the main one. The last sentence of Feynman's report, and thus the last sentence of the final report (including appendix) of our federal government's inquiry into the Challenger shuttle disaster, is:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Doesn't that explain our federal government's failure in this coronavirus crisis? People like Trump can say anything. He can say there are 15 cases and in a few days those will go to zero. He can say it's contained and that there's no reason to worry. He can say we're going to "open everything up" at Easter, "a beautiful timeline." But that's all public relations taking precedence over reality. The virus ("Nature") isn't affected by Trump's speech acts. Public policy in this case has to take account of the subject matter of microbiology and epidemiology, two of ten million subjects about which Trump's ignorance is comprehensive and his interest in learning, negligible. So, while he blathers and dithers, thinking of it as a political problem for him, the virus, according to laws well understood by scientists, spreads in the population, and the necessary measures are not taken—a monumental failure.
It's not as if conservative political views make it impossible to comprehend the truth of the situation. Here is Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and daughter of Dick, tweeting something sensible the other day, when Trump was still talking about crowding the churches on Easter and the cure being worse than the disease:
There will be no normally functioning economy if our hospitals are overwhelmed and thousands of Americans of all ages, including our doctors and nurses, lay dying because we have failed to do what’s necessary to stop the virus. https://t.co/AchwfXtuLi
— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) March 24, 2020
We'd all have a better chance of getting through this if people who think Ivy League epidemiologists are all effeminate alarmists would at least listen to her. The president, alas, is an irresponsible menace.
UPDATE: Just adding a video clip of probably the most dramatic moment of the Challenger investigation. Pretty sure that the reporter mispronounces Feynman's last name: should be like Fine-man (not Fayn-man).
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