Tag: Richard Feynman

I was using my clicker to try to find something worth watching on my 600 station FIOS TV system last night with no luck. Nothing of interest on these hundreds of worthless channels. Then I stumbled across a channel I didn’t even know I had – The Science Channel. Names don’t mean much when channels like Discovery broadcast Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty. The Science Channel was running a movie called The Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster. I figured it was some sort of dry documentary, but to my surprise it was a real movie with the great actor William Hurt playing the lead role. He was playing the part of Richard Feynman. I had never heard of him before watching this excellent movie, that should have been on a major network.

I realized why a MSM corporate station didn’t want to touch this movie after it showed how our government, along with a major corporation, knowingly sent seven astronauts to their deaths in the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 by ignoring clear data that indicated extreme risk for that launch. NASA, the government and Morton Thiokol then conspired to cover-up their malfeasance and reckless decision making because profits and funding for their programs were more important than the lives of those astronauts. The Rogers Commission would have come to an inconclusive decision if not for Richard Feynman.

He was dying of cancer but still relentlessly pursued the truth. He never trusted authority. He hated government bureaucracy. He wasn’t a political animal. He cared about the truth and sought facts. The NASA officials lied and declared that the O-rings used in the Shuttle could withstand cold up to -40 degrees Fahrenhit. On national TV Feynman proved that the O-Rings would not retain their shape in a glass of 32 degree ice water. He revealed the NASA and Morton Thiokol executives as liars and criminals. NASA chose to launch the Space Shuttle when the temperature was below 32 degrees because they felt pressure to launch two per month in order to get their funding from Congress increased. They were warned by their own engineers that this could be catastrophic. They ignored the warnings and ended up murdering 7 astronauts.

Feynman devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience on the Rogers Commission, straying from his usual convention of brief, light-hearted anecdotes to deliver an extended and sober narrative. Feynman’s account 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. For instance, NASA managers claimed that there was a 1 in 100,000 chance of a catastrophic failure aboard the shuttle, but Feynman discovered that NASA’s own engineers estimated the chance of a catastrophe at closer to 1 in 200. He concluded that the space shuttle reliability estimate by NASA management was fantastically unrealistic, and he was particularly angered that NASA used these figures to recruit Christa McAuliffe into the Teacher-in-Space program. He warned in his appendix to the commission’s report (which was included only after he threatened not to sign the report), “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

The unholy alliance between government and mega-corporations will never benefit the American people. Feynman’s defeat of the corporate fascists in 1987 was nothing but a rearguard action by one of the few remaining true patriots. We’ve since lost the war, as the military industrial complex, the Wall Street cabal, and the sickcare complex have completely captured our government and turned it against the American people.

After the movie was over, they followed it with a show about his fascinating life. I can’t believe I had never heard of him. He was one of the most brilliant physicists of all-time. At the age of 27 he worked on the Manhattan Project while his 25 year old wife was dying of tuberculosis. Her death and his realization of having unleashed the power of a bomb that could destroy the world put him into a deep depression. But he overcame it and went on to become a leader in the field of quantum mechanics and the creator of nanotechnology. The documentary also mentioned how his father would read to him from the Encyclopedia Brittanica and how his father taught him to not trust government officials just because of their positions. Then I stumbled across this quote from him:

“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”

He had a deep distrust for the government and those reliant on the government. He was a free thinking, liberty minded, skeptic who questioned everything. Freedom to question the actions of your government is essential for a country to thrive. We sure could use a few more men like Richard Feynman during these critical times.