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 of negligence that several members of that commission were strongly opposed to acknowledging out of concern for the political consequences. In his characteristic way of illustrating complex concepts simply, he asked for the microphone during a televised press conference, held up a small piece of o-ring rubber up in front of a national media audience, and showed how soft and flexible it was. Then, he plunged it into his pitcher of ice water, removed it, and demonstrated how easily it broke in half when flexed. It was that demonstration that proved that NASA and Morton Thiokol caused the Challenger loss by insisting on a launch in weather that their data suggested was outside the known safety margins for a launch. But for his persistence, courage, and his impromptu demonstration, the nation might never have known what cause the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger.