Feynman Dies: Physics Loses Its Most Brilliant Storyteller
Richard Feynman diagnosed the Challenger disaster by dropping a piece of O-ring into a glass of ice water during a televised Senate hearing. The rubber stiffened. That was the whole presentation. He'd done it alone, after the official investigation kept steering around the answer. He won the Nobel Prize for work so abstract it still resists plain explanation. What he couldn't stand was pretending not to know something when you did know it.
February 15, 1988
38 years ago
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