Inspirational Figure -- Richard Feynman

Inspirational Figure -- Richard Feynman When I was in high school, I watched a documentary on the Challenger disaster in 1986 when the first of two of the Space Shuttle craft fleet exploded shortly after liftoff. One of the most intriguing aspects of the documentary was the brilliantly simple way that one of the members of the investigation panel demonstrated the failure of the now-infamous "o-ring" component that lead to the loss of the Challenger.

That documentary prompted me to look up the member of the panel who conducted that demonstration after requesting a pitcher of ice water for that purpose during the televise press conference. Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who taught at the California Institute of Technology until his death from cancer in 1988 at the age of 69.

He was a mathematics prodigy who taught himself advanced calculus by the age of fifteen and completed every physics course offered at the Massachusetts Institute of technology before the end of his sophomore year, including a graduate-level course in theoretical physics. He is the only person ever to have achieved a perfect score on the Mathematics and Physics graduate school entrance examination for Princeton University where he completed his graduate studies. During World War II, Dr.

Feynman worked on the historic Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico under world-renowned physicist Hans Bethe. In reading about Dr. Feynman, I discovered that in addition to his numerous accomplishments in his field of physics, he also authored numerous books that had nothing to do with physics. They were tremendously influential in my life. In particular, I read Surely You're Joking, Mr.

Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, and What Do You Care What They Think?, the latter titled as a reference to a lesson that the author learned from his first wife who died prematurely in 1945 from tuberculosis. While at Los Alamos, he regularly drove back and forth to Albuquerque to spend as much time as possible with her before her death. Dr. Feynman's writing taught me several important lessons that have become important themes in my life.

I learned the importance of personal integrity, such as deciding for yourself what is genuinely right and honorable and knowing when to ignore the biases and opinions of others, especially when those opinions conflict with doing what one knows is right. Dr. Feynman was a man of extremely varied interests who frequented a particular burlesque club while at Cal Tech, often using the dancers there as inspiration for his amateur artistic drawings.

When the club was prosecuted for lewdness by the city, none of its hundreds of regular patrons would agree to testify in court on behalf of the establishment because of their embarrassment, except for one: Dr. Feynman. Ironically, he was also the patron with the greatest potential personal risk to his professional reputation but he believed that the establishment had done nothing wrong so he agreed to testify on its behalf. During the Rogers Commission investigation of the Challenger disaster, it was Dr.

Feynman who practically single-handedly identified the sources of the problems that lead to the explosion of the Space Shuttle. He recognized that NASA administrators and executives at Morton Thiokol had been irresponsible in emphasizing cost savings and public relations over mission safety and he forced the commission to consider issues.