Other People Think?: Furt... - What Do You Care What

He remembered Arline. Even years after her death, her voice was the clearest thing in his mind. “What do you care what other people think?” she would say whenever he worried about social graces or academic standing. She had been the one to teach him that the truth didn't have a hierarchy.

The official line was that the cold weather on the morning of the launch shouldn't have mattered. The "experts" had charts and data suggesting the rubber was resilient enough. But Richard didn't care about their charts. He cared about the nature of the material itself.

"I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water," he said, his voice calm but piercing. "And I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it, it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same shape. In other words, for at least a few seconds at thirty-two degrees, there is no resilience in this particular material." What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Furt...

As he left the hearing, the reporters swarmed, but Richard was already thinking about the next problem. He knew that the hardest part of science wasn't the math; it was having the courage to see what was right in front of your eyes, regardless of what the rest of the world told you to see.

After a few minutes, as the cameras panned toward him, he pulled the clamp out and released the rubber. It didn't snap back. It stayed pinched, frozen and brittle. He remembered Arline

While the rest of the commission focused on high-level briefings and polished presentations, Richard went to the engineers. He went to the garages. He wanted to touch the hardware. He became obsessed with the O-rings—the giant rubber seals that were supposed to keep scorching gases trapped inside the rocket boosters.

During a televised hearing, the room was stiff with tension and prepared statements. Richard sat quietly with a glass of ice water and a small C-clamp he’d bought at a hardware store. He had a piece of the O-ring material—a small, unassuming red loop. She had been the one to teach him

The desk in Richard’s study was buried under a blizzard of blueprints and technical manuals. To the public, Richard Feynman was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist with the bongo drums and the mischievous grin. But inside, he felt like a man wandering through a thick fog. He had been recruited to the commission investigating the Challenger disaster, and the bureaucratic weight of Washington was suffocating.