Some serious thinking about our basic values left over from the holiday weekend

"We praise our Founders annually for revolting against royal rule and for creating an exceptionally durable system of self-government. We can wreck that system if we forget our Founders’ purpose of creating a representative form of national authority robust enough to secure the public good."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his WaPo column
"What our Declaration really said"

"[W]hat we deserve is what's going to happen: war and revolution, famine and drought, climate change on a scale we truly don't understand."

-- Ian Welsh, in the blogpost "Deserve: the deadliest word"

by Ken

There are important new pieces to talk about by E. J. Dionne Jr. and Ian Welsh, but for now we'll have to make do with the above teases. All weekend I've been meaning to re-call everyone's attention to two remarkable documents Howie flagged for us from Asia, which directly address the question of our basic democratic values.

There was, first, the "postcard" Arianna Huffington wrote based on her recent visit to Greece, where she observed the remarkable spirit and well of the Greek people, even in the face of the relentless beating down being rained down on them by the greedy oligarchs of the international financial elite; and the speech Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered last week on the Senate floor, about the betrayal of basic American values by the American branch of that international financial elite, so confident that it can get away with having the tab for its greed and screwing up passed on to the people it screwed.

Here's just a snippet of Arianna:

Given that the Greeks have always been all about connection, expansiveness and intimacy, it's no surprise that social media have combined with the Greek personality to create a perfect storm of expression, engagement and democracy. . . .

Everywhere I went I was stunned by the level of engagement -- it's not just those physically at [Syntagma] Square who are all in. . . . [T]here's a lot of anger and resentment in the square -- most of it very justified -- but there's also an incredible amount of hope, and, considering how hard things are for millions of people in Greece, an incredible lack of cynicism. This isn't just an "anti" protest -- there's a lot of "pro" in it, as well.

And here's a snatch of Bernie:

Mr. President, this is a lot of pain that the Republicans are tossing out while they want to protect their rich and powerful friends. In my view, the president has got to stand tall, take the case to the American people, and hold the Republicans responsible if the debt ceiling is not raised and the repercussions of that.

That, Mr. President, is what's going on in the real world. People fighting to keep their homes from falling into foreclosure; struggling with credit card debt; marriages have been postponed; lives have been derailed; and retirement savings have been raided to pay for college tuition, to keep their businesses afloat, or simply to keep gas in their car and pay their bills. That is what is going on in the real world.

And, Mr. President, while the middle class disappears and poverty is increasing, there is another reality and that is that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider and wider. The United States now has, by far, the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth. . . .

It's about time that Washington listened to the American people. Let's reduce the deficit. But, let's do it in a fair and responsible way that requires shared sacrifice from the wealthiest Americans and most profitable corporations.

AND IF I MIGHT FLOG A PIECE OF MY OWN . . .

Saturday I used the occasion of a recent NYRB review-reminiscence by the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson about his mentor-colleague-friend Richard Feynman to recall the great physicist's heroic performance as a member of the Rogers Commission appointed (almost certainly) to whitewash the causes of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster, with the added detail supplied by Dyson that Feynman at the time was fighting an apparently gruesome and exhausting battle with the cancer that indeed killed him ("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, I ventured, is a prime candidate for hero status to "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." Feel free to skip my sketching to go directly to the Dyson NYRB piece at the above link. He also gives us a better impression than I've previously had of the sort of scientist Feynman was, driven by that same obsessive regard for the discovery of truth, and the sort of person he was (ditto).

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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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Déjà vu all over again: Who could have foreseen the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

Who could have foreseen the explosion of

the space shuttle Challenger? (Who indeed.)

"The commission found that the Challenger accident was caused by a failure in the O-rings sealing the aft field joint on the right solid rocket booster, which allowed pressurized hot gases and eventually flame to 'blow by' the O-ring and make contact with the adjacent external tank, causing structural failure. The failure of the O-rings was attributed to a design flaw, as their performance could be too easily compromised by factors including the low temperature on the day of launch."

-- from the Wikipedia entry on the Rogers Commission

Report on the Challenger space-shuttle disaster

From today's New York Times:

Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig

The Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

By IAN URBINA
Published: May 29, 2010

WASHINGTON — Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.

The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer. . . .

by Ken

Remember the Challenger disaster?

My goodness, can it really be 24 years already? I think, next to the JFK assassination and the planes flying into the World Trade Center on 9/11, it's my most vivid "Do you remember where you were when you heard the news?" moment.

Remember O-rings? Who outside the aviation and space-flight industries had ever heard of an O-ring until some time after the Challenger blew up?

By the time of that ill-fated launch, we had all become pretty blasé about the no-longer-dramatic "routine" of space launches. However, the news that a space shuttle had blown up sure as shootin' riveted the country's attention. And what I remember most vividly from that time, after the unbelievable news itself, was the utter mysteriousness of it all. Officially, at least, nobody had a clue how such a thing could happen. Even in those pre-cable-news days, the talking heads suddenly had a lot of air time to fill, and everyone seemed to agree it was all beyond the realm of possibility, beyond even the possibility of speculation. Truly unfathomable.

Except it wasn't. We found out eventually that there were a lot of people who not only could fathom it but knew it could happen. There were even people who lived in haunted dread that it would happen, under conditions like those, incredibly, that obtained the day of the Challenger launch. Namely, that it was really, really cold. Oops!

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's try to reimagine ourselves back in those tender days of innocence, when the Challenger explosion was still beyond the range of human understanding. The job of sorting out what happened was entrusted to a commission popularly known by the name of its chairman, former Secretary of State William Rogers.

I remember reading much later about the participation on the Rogers Commission of Nobel physicist Richard Feynman. 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. I know I should probably do some research to refresh my memory of what I read, but heck, this is just a blog, so let's go with memory, even knowing how that would have appalled Richard Feynman.

It would have appalled but not surprised him. 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.

I suppose the Rogers Commission would have figured out about the O-rings with or without Feynman. You have to figure, though, that it didn't hurt to have him tramping around asking those embarrassing questions, interested only in the facts, with no concern for who might be embarrassed or inconvenienced. Here's Wikipedia on the role of Feynman:

One of the commission's best-known members was theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. His style of investigating with his own direct methods rather than following the commission schedule put him at odds with Rogers, who once commented, "Feynman is becoming a real pain." During a televised hearing, Feynman famously demonstrated how the O-rings became less resilient and subject to seal failures at ice-cold temperatures by immersing a sample of the material in a glass of ice water.[4] Feynman's own investigation reveals a disconnect between NASA's engineers and executives that was far more striking than he expected. His interviews of NASA's high-ranking managers revealed startling misunderstandings of elementary concepts. One such concept was the determination of a safety factor.

The facts, alas, were almost unimaginably horrible. Not only were both space-shuttle contractor Morton Thiokol and NASA fully briefed about the danger; there were people who argued to the death (the death of the shuttle crew, as it turned out) against going ahead with the launch under the conditions in effect that day.

I seem to remember there was one engineer at Morton Thiokol who was so sure that just such an eventuality could eventuate that he lived in a state of constant torment. Against tremendous pressure from above, he kept shooting his dread up the chain of command, and naturally was dismissed by his superiors as a troublemaker, and coerced to shut his Nervous Nellie trap. After all, there was a lot of money at stake, both in the space-shuttle program generally and specifically in sticking as closely as possible to the schedule -- meaning going ahead with the launch with a minimum of delay. And "money at stake" trumps the whining of some pathetic engineer who probably wasn't even making a six-figure salary. How important could he or his whining be?

And then the Challenger blew up.

I learned something from that experience which other people already knew but which we all need to learn, one way or another. Anytime one of these "inexplicable" events occurs, surpassing the limits of human understanding, just wait for it. The odds are overwhelming that soon enough we'll learn that not only can it be understood, it was understood, and was probably a subject of deadly concern among the initiated.

The odds are also extremely good that a small, beleaguered band of fact-based whiners was pitted against a larger, or at any rate more powerful, group of deniers. Usually it will turn out that the deniers were looking at a balance sheet, seeing precious dollars flying out the window to assuage the concerns of the comparatively lowly whiners, who might not even know how to read a balance sheet.

In the end, of course, the balance sheet on the Challenger didn't look all that great even to the all-important and all-powerful Money People. Just as the balance sheet on the Deepwater Horizon mess isn't going to look so good, unless you happen to be looking at the balance sheet of one of the companies that is, er, cleaning up on the disaster. (Never forget that article of faith to the Corporate Right: Disasters are just financial windfalls that haven't been cashed in yet.)

For what it's worth, I haven't bothered reading much beyond the portion of Ian Urbina's NYT report I've quoted above. Somehow, I have the feeling I've already read it. Too many times.

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