I don't have many heroes, but Richard Feynman is one of them, even though I understand hardly anything about his work in physics

"Feynman’s dramatic exposure of NASA incompetence and his O-ring demonstrations made him a hero to the general public. . . . Afterward, he was admired by a much wider public, as a crusader for honesty and plain speaking in government. Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government could look to Feynman as a leader."

"Feynman was radical in his disrespect for authority, but conservative in his science. . . . He tried to find new laws of nature, but the result of his efforts was in the end to consolidate the existing laws in a new structure. He hoped to find discrepancies that would prove the old theories wrong, but nature stubbornly persisted in proving them right. However disrespectful he might be to famous old scientists, he was never disrespectful to nature."

-- from Freeman Dyson's "The 'Dramatic Picture' of Richard
Feynman," in the July 14 New York Review of Books

by Ken

I don't have a lot of heroes, but the late Richard Feynman (1918-1988) is one of them. I'm pretty

In May 2010, I wrote a post called "Déjà vu all over again: Who could have foreseen the Deepwater Horizon disaster?," in response to "disclosures" about the oil-spill catastrophe which had "revealed" -- surprise! surprise! -- that not only was the disaster not "unforeseeable," it had in fact been foreseen by competent technical people familiar with the off-shore drilling technology in use.

This reminded me all too forcefully of the lesson I had learned from the investigation into the explosion on lift-off of the space shuttle Challenger: that these shocking, seemingly out-of-nowhere "accidents" rarely come out of nowhere, but in fact are foreseen by competent technical people whose foresight was not only ignored but usually actively and forcefully suppressed.

In the wake of a disaster as public as the Challenger one, naturally a commission of inquiry was appointed, headed by safe and smooth old establishment pol William Rogers. To anyone in the know, it was clear that the principal function of the Rogers Commission was to not rock the boat: to find conclusions that would sort of explain what happened, but in a way that provided a clean bill of health for the status quo and everyone who mattered inside it. (In such cases it's permissible, if necessary, to designate a scapegoat, but you can be pretty sure it's not going to be somebody important, not somebody "who matters" to the powers-that-be.)

We'll never know what the Rogers Commission would have "found" if Richard Feynman had followed his inclination to decline an invitation to serve on it. As I wrote back in May 2010:

Apparently Feynman was by nature, as you would expect any great scientist to be, a questioner and doubter, possibly to the point of being a positive pain in the posterior. . . .

My recollection is that it was an ex-wife of Feynman's who recalled how dubious the scientist had been about accepting appointment to the commission. He felt it would just be a dozen people being herded from official briefing to official briefing swallowing officially sanctioned talking points for the purpose of arriving at an officially sanctioned conclusion. The ex-wife, as I recall, pointed out to him that that's what the commission would be without him, whereas with him it would be 11 people shuttling from official briefing to official briefing plus him prowling around asking unofficially sanctioned sources inconvenient, likely embarrassing or even incriminating questions.

One thing I didn't now till now is that an important part of Feynman's disinclination to get roped into what he suspected was meant to be a whitewash was that he was dying -- fighting a grueling, draining battle against cancer. Freeman Dyson tells the story in a New York Review of Books review of two new books on his onetime mentor and then colleague, "The 'Dramatic Picture' of Richard Feynman":

[W]hen Feynman was mortally ill with cancer, he served on the NASA commission investigating the Challenger disaster of 1986. He undertook this job reluctantly, knowing that it would use up most of the time and strength that he had left. He undertook it because he felt an obligation to find the root causes of the disaster and to speak plainly to the public about his findings. He went to Washington and found what he had expected at the heart of the tragedy: a bureaucratic hierarchy with two groups of people, the engineers and the managers, who lived in separate worlds and did not communicate with each other. The engineers lived in the world of technical facts; the managers lived in the world of political dogmas.

He asked members of both groups to tell him their estimates of the risk of disastrous failure in each Space Shuttle mission. The engineers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred missions. The managers estimated the risk to be of the order of one disaster in a hundred thousand missions. The difference, a factor of a thousand between the two estimates, was never reconciled and never openly discussed. The managers were in charge of the operations and made the decisions to fly or not to fly, based on their own estimates of the risk. But the technical facts that Feynman uncovered proved that the managers were wrong and the engineers were right.

Feynman had two opportunities to educate the public about the causes of the disaster. The first opportunity concerned the technical facts. An open meeting of the commission was held with newspaper and television reporters present. Feynman was prepared with a glass of ice water and a sample of a rubber O-ring seal from a shuttle solid-fuel booster rocket. He dipped the piece of rubber into the ice water, pulled it out, and demonstrated the fact that the cold rubber was stiff. The cold rubber would not function as a gas-tight seal to keep the hot rocket exhaust away from the structure. Since the Challenger launch had occurred on January 28 in unusually cold weather, Feynman’s little demonstration pointed to the stiffening of the O-ring seal as a probable technical cause of the disaster.

The second opportunity to educate the public concerned the culture of NASA. Feynman wrote an account of the cultural situation as he saw it, with the fatal division of the NASA administration into two noncommunicating cultures, engineers and managers. The political dogma of the managers, declaring risks to be a thousand times smaller than the technical facts would indicate, was the cultural cause of the disaster. The political dogma arose from a long history of public statements by political leaders that the Shuttle was safe and reliable. Feynman ended his account with the famous declaration: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Feynman fought hard to have his statement of conclusions incorporated in the official report of the commission. The chairman of the commission, William Rogers, was a professional politician with long experience in government. Rogers wished the public to believe that the Challenger disaster was a highly unlikely accident for which NASA was not to blame. He fought hard to exclude Feynman’s statement from the report. In the end a compromise was reached. Feynman’s statement was not included in the report but was added as an appendix at the end, with a note saying that it was Feynman’s personal statement and not agreed to by the commission. This compromise worked to Feynman’s advantage. As he remarked at the time, the appendix standing at the end got much more public attention than it would have if it had been part of the official report.

Feynman’s dramatic exposure of NASA incompetence and his O-ring demonstrations made him a hero to the general public. The event was the beginning of his rise to the status of superstar. Before his service on the Challenger commission, he was widely admired by knowledgeable people as a scientist and a colorful character. Afterward, he was admired by a much wider public, as a crusader for honesty and plain speaking in government. Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government could look to Feynman as a leader.

Dyson (born 1923) gets why his old friend and colleague is one of my heroes, though I wonder if he hasn't defined it too narrowly. "Anyone fighting secrecy and corruption in any part of the government" indeed, but more broadly, anyone who values the quest for truth, especially at a time when a cancerously ferocious ideology has put truth at the top of its hit list, anyone who believes that without that commitment to truth we're pretty much lost as a species.

I'm obviously in no position to evaluate Feynman's importance as a physicist, because I don't understand anything about his work, though I have a much better general sense now from Dyson of the kind of work he did. It's my understanding that among physicists Feynman's standing is very high. I'm similarly unequipped to evaluate Freeman Dyson's standing as a physicist, though again my impression is that he is regarded highly by physicists. I do know that Dyson, NYRB's go-to guy not just for physics but frequently for matters of broader scientific interest, is an exceptional writer, from whom I have learned a great deal about the scientists and even the scientific issues he has written about.

One of the two books about Feynman which Dyson is reviewing, Feynman by writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Myrick, is highly unusual in format:

It is a comic-book biography of Feynman, containing 266 pages of pictures of Feynman and his legendary adventures. In every picture, bubbles of text record Feynman’s comments, mostly taken from stories that he and others had told and published in earlier books.

Dyson points out that the appropriate Japanese term for such a book is not the commonly used manga ("idle picture"), but gekiga (""dramatic picture"), and judges this "a fine example of gekiga for Western readers," whose "images capture with remarkable sensitivity the essence of Feynman's character," speaking "with the voice of the real Feynman." He notes, by the way:

It comes as a shock to see myself portrayed in these pages, as a lucky young student taking a four-day ride with Feynman in his car from Cleveland to Albuquerque, sharing with him some unusual lodgings and entertained by an unending stream of his memorable conversation.

And it's hard not to envy Dyson his association with Feynman. However, this seems to be the happy case of a student singularly equipped to take advantage of the opportunity for mentorship by such a formidable practitioner.

"Toward the end of Feynman’s life," Dyson writes, "his conservative view of quantum science became unfashionable." But "he had no patience" for the fanciful philosophical speculations of his younger colleagues. "According to Feynman, the road to understanding is not to argue about philosophy but to continue exploring the facts of nature. In recent years, a new generation of experimenters has been advancing along Feynman’s road with great success, moving into the new worlds of quantum computing and quantum cryptography."

He returns now to the other book under review, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss, which he has described as "a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist," by "an expert physicist and a gifted writer of scientific books for the general public," which shows us the side of Feynman’s personality that was least visible to most of his admirers, the silent and persistent calculator working intensely through long days and nights to figure out how nature works."

Krauss shows us a portrait of a scientist who was unusually unselfish. His disdain for honors and rewards was genuine. After he was elected to membership of the United States National Academy of Sciences, he resigned his membership because the members of the academy spent too much of their time debating who was worthy of admission in the next academy election. He considered the academy to be more concerned with self-glorification than with public service. He hated all hierarchies, and wanted no badge of superior academic status to come between him and his younger friends. He considered science to be a collective enterprise in which educating the young was as important as making personal discoveries. He put as much effort into his teaching as into his thinking.

He never showed the slightest resentment when I published some of his ideas before he did. He told me that he avoided disputes about priority in science by following a simple rule: “Always give the bastards more credit than they deserve.” I have followed this rule myself. I find it remarkably effective for avoiding quarrels and making friends. A generous sharing of credit is the quickest way to build a healthy scientific community. In the end, Feynman’s greatest contribution to science was not any particular discovery. His contribution was the creation of a new way of thinking that enabled a great multitude of students and colleagues, including me, to make their own discoveries.

Even more than before, Richard Feynman is one of my heroes. And I'm pretty darned grateful for Freeman Dyson too.

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