Reading period: Jan 2017

Content

  • life with first wife
  • conference in Poland
  • investigating the Challenger disaster (greatest part)
  • appendix – Feynman’s appendix to official presidential commission record
    • They did not want to include it in the main body of the report because of its controvery and open critique.

Topics

  • “What do you care what other people think”
    • he did not agree initially, told him by his wife (Arlene)
    • his modification – if foreign opinions don’t make sense/are wrong, then ignore them
  • feminists
  • antisemitism
    • “[went to MIT] I couldn’t go to Columbia because of the Jewish quota.”
  • open relationship
  • “Those days were very, very different from now. In those days, you had to go all the way up in your career before marrying.”
  • (father) “He felt that women were the great danger to a man, that a man always has to watch out and be tough about women.”
  • about father
    • “he sent me to all these universities in order to find out those things, and he never did find out.”
  • meaning of life = reproduction
    • “No matter how complicated the business is, the main point is to do it again!”
  • shallow learning
    • “I learned trigonometry from that, but I soon forgot it again, because I didn’t understand it very well.”
  • exclusivity of (math) knowledge
    • “In those days, things like the Möbius strip weren’t so well known to everybody”
  • old(er) people take up painting
  • “Although the place was cheap, it was clean. (It’s Switzerland; it was clean!)”
  • “After seeing this movie I was very changed, from my semi anti-NASA attitude to a very strong pro-NASA attitude.”
  • different life in the capital (Washington)
    • people in suits, less integrity
  • management miscommunication
  • quality of space shuttle
    • SRBs (solid rocket boosters), main engines, avionics
      • old computers, redundancy, low memory
  • bottom-up vs top-down design (and ease of testing/verification)
  • “I worked at Los Alamos, and I experienced the tension and the pressure of everybody working together to make the atomic bomb.”
  • “You don’t have to tell me there’s baby on board; I’m gonna drive carefully anyway!”
  • “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

Characters

  • Richard Feynman
  • Feynman’s father
  • Feynman’s sister
  • Arlene (Feynman) – 1st wife
  • Gweneth (Feynman) – 3rd wife
  • General Kutyna – colleague from Challenger committee
  • Mr. Rogers