From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation, the physicist Richard Feynman loved to shoot down what he called “lousy ideas.” Today, the world is awash in lousy ideas — so maybe it’s time to get some more Feynman in our lives? (Part one of a three-part series.)
So a little scrap of paper in my dad's writing, he had a weird way of working where he would just write on, like, if he ran out of paper or something, he would grab a Kleenex box or write on the corners of junk mail or wherever there was clear space.
That is Michelle Feynman.
Her father is the late Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who taught for decades at Caltech, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
And that's where we are today.
In a climate controlled underground archive going through her father's files, Feynman led an unusual and unusually eventful life.
While he was still in graduate school, he was recruited to join the Manhattan project, the us military's secret program to build an atomic bomb.
Toward the end of his life, he was asked to join a presidential commission to investigate the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.
NASA had launched the challenger from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a cold January day in 1986.
It was in the air only 73 seconds before it exploded on live tv.
All seven crew members were killed, including a schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe.
I remember being in history, and we didn't take our test, and they said that a terrible thing had happened.
And then I came home, and my parents, who rarely had the television on, were in front of the television.
They seemed pretty distraught by the whole thing.
And then I guess he got a call inviting him to be part of the commission.
This commission was ordered by President Ronald Reagan.
Feynmans wife, Gwyneth, urged her husband to accept the invitation.
He was disinclined physics.
He loved solving theoretical mysteries.
He loved, it was the politics he hated.
Feynman was now 67 years old, and hed been sick for a while with cancer.