A shout out to a role model: Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918-February 15, 1988)

Where have you gone, Richard Feynman? (Our nation would've turned their lonely eyes to you...)

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts…The experts who are leading you may be wrong… I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television -- words, books, and so on -- are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”

~ Richard Feynman

This weekend I turned on the radio in my car and NPR popped on. As I have explained before, I have a special disdain for this organization. Now, listening to NPR reminds me of how long I can go without questioning what I have been told and how easily I can be taken in by voices that seem reasonable, voices that offer cherry-picked opinions and sanctimonious certainty. I suppose I should be indebted to them for opening my eyes, or to be more precise, showing me that my eyes were closed.

I tuned in to hear someone speaking, someone whose voice was immediately recognizable to me. It was Richard P. Feynman, perhaps the greatest American theoretical physicist of all time. He was recounting his experience watching the Trinity test, the first time an atomic bomb was successfully detonated. Feynman, still in his early twenties at the time, was recruited to work on the Manhattan project with some of the greatest minds on the planet.

Atomic Heritage

Feynman is one of my heroes, a role model. I had never heard of Dick Feynman when I matriculated at MIT 49 years after he did. I was unaware of many things back then.

One day early in my last semester I walked into one of the bigger cafeterias on campus to have lunch and I saw a small table of undergraduates looking solemn. One was crying. I recognized one of them from one of my engineering classes.

“Why the long faces?”, I asked.

“Richard Feynman died yesterday.”

“Oh no! That’s terrible. Who’s Richard Feynman?”, I teased.

They all shot me disapproving stares. I learned from them that he was once an undergrad at MIT like we were and he went on to become one of the greatest scientists of all time. Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics a year before I was born.

I was embarrassed. Not just because I didn’t know who this Feynman character was but also because I somehow ended up going to college where 20 year olds cried about the passing of theoretical physicists. Where did I go wrong?

Not long before leaving this world, Feynman made his final scientific contribution by explaining why the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all aboard minutes after its launch two years earlier. NASA scientists were baffled.

But just a few months after the Challenger disaster, Feynman offered the explanation: Rubber O-Ring seals were not resilient at the temperature on the day of the launch. In this minute long clip Feynman explains what he found to the Rogers Commission. Note how he first confirms that NASA had considered this possibility but was confident that the O-ring material would perform properly under launch conditions that day.

Then, famously using a cup of ice water, Feynman demonstrated for all to see that the NASA scientists and engineers were tragically wrong. This is what he meant by “the belief in the ignorance of experts”.

Feynman grew up in Far Rockaway, NY. He’s the only person I know whose NY accent adds gravitas to what they are saying. He also knows how to say a lot with few words. Perhaps that’s what happens when you know what you’re talking about.

When it comes to his field of study, quantum electrodynamics, I cannot explain why Feynman’s insight surpassed so many others. What is obvious is his ability to explain complicated ideas to students, colleagues and readers of his books where he recounts many interesting incidents during his education, his adventures abroad and his time at Los Alamos.

Feynman was intensely curious and humble and decided early in his career that he would only pursue ideas joyfully. It was his playful curiosity that in fact led to the discoveries for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

He also had no problem challenging the scientific orthodoxy of which he was a part. It was his willingness to push back that earned him respect from the great Danish physicist, Neils Bohr, who would seek out the young Feynman, who was still in his mid-twenties, to discuss ideas before presenting them to larger groups of senior scientists at Los Alamos.

Like Feynman, Bohr wasn’t interested in approval. He was interested in getting it right. Bohr’s son, Aage, later explained that his father knew that Feynman was the only person there who wasn’t intimidated by him. Bohr, a towering figure in theoretical physics, needed someone who wasn’t afraid to let him know which of his ideas were lousy.

I never met Dr. Feynman. I know of him only through his recorded lectures in physics and a series of books he wrote for the layperson. In one of his first books, “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman” he entertains readers with anecdotes about how he learned to pick file cabinet locks and safes at the super-secret facility in New Mexico, the importance of being able to estimate an answer before doing the calculation and how he became a respectable bongo drummer.

Feynman was unapologetically critical of the scientific establishment’s hubris and the military’s need to silo information and talent.

This is the anecdote which I still find the most inspiring, especially in today’s world (from “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman’):

“One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.

So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, ‘Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead.’

It was such such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best—sum it all up—without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”

This anecdote pointed to something remarkable. If you put truly great scientists in a room together they would eventually agree on the best solution, given what was known at the time. Great scientists didn’t just have a command of the science, they wouldn’t let their egos or personal feelings get in the way of their inquiry.

I once thought that this is the way science was done. His story inspired me. I knew I didn’t have the chops to win Nobel prizes. I just wanted to be one of the people at the table, or at the very least, emulate them.

Things are much different now. Or maybe institutionalized science has been corrupted for a very long time as Feynman warned us later in his life.

What would Richard Feynman have said about 9/11?

I don’t believe Richard Feynman would have ever been asked to sit on the 9/11 Commission. Why would you need a Nobel laureate to figure out what happened on that day? Isn’t it obvious that two planes can bring three skyscrapers to the ground in a few seconds? Why even bother doing an investigation?

Here’s a photo of one of the twin towers “coming down”:

Given his clear mind and experience in making large explosions (see above), I very much doubt Richard Feynman would have accepted that this was a steel reinforced megastructure that was crushing itself to dust. Most of the material in the building is being thrown outward and upward. What then is doing the “crushing”? He would have asked the obvious question: Were explosives used?

But unlike the Rogers Commission which earnestly sought an explanation of Challenger’s demise, the 9/11 Commission wasn’t doing an investigation; it was conducting a cover-up. That’s why such a question was never answered.

Feynman might have entertained NIST’s hypothesis for a minute or two, but once realizing that highly energetic explosives were never ruled out, he would have called out the “investigation” as obvious bunk and the coordinated attack upon anyone who stated this plain fact as “intellectual tyranny in the name of science”.

The mere presence of explosives, if there were any, would lead immediately to other questions: how could you get so much explosive into the building without anyone noticing? Why would terrorists fly suicide missions into the buildings if they had already loaded them with explosives? Terrorists acting alone could only use planes. Only conspirators with access to the buildings would need explosives to bring the three buildings down as well as planes—to conceal their treacherous act and the real mechanism of destruction.

Finding explosives would have immediately implicated elements of the US Government, the very institution conducting the “investigation”, as the perpetrators of an unthinkable crime. Isn’t it obvious that this was the real reason the possibility of a controlled demolition was never entertained despite human remains found a fifth of a mile away, multi-ton building components thrown hundreds of yards and hundreds of official Firefighter testimonies which unequivocally describe multiple explosive events in the twin towers prior to their “collapse”?

Yup, Feynman would have been the last person asked to be on that committee. He also would have been the first person to call out the utter absurdity of NIST’s initial assumptions and final conclusions. If he was willing, at the age of 25, to tell Neils Bohr that one of his ideas was lousy, he certainly wouldn’t have had any problems telling Philip Zelikow (Executive Director, 9/11 Commission), Shyam Sundar (NIST Lead Investigator, WTC 7) and the “experts” at NIST that they were full of shit.

Of course the physics prodigy, consummate teacher and space shuttle disaster sleuth would not have received any attention in the days or years following 9/11. He would have been a dangerous “misinformation spreader” or perhaps more kindly a “once venerated theoretical physicist in his ninth decade who is attached to wild conspiracy theories that have been debunked by governmental officials and Popular Mechanics”. You see? Even Nobel prize winners can be seduced by conspiracy theorists. We must censor and punish those who undermine our free and safe society!

I also think that if he were around today he would be an outspoken critic of the pandemic response, the unfounded claims made by the CDC and the unwillingness of the medical establishment to be transparent or answer direct questions from people who are qualified to raise concerns.

Feynman is widely reported as having said:

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”

You don’t have to be an epidemiologist or vaccine expert to see that being unable to question answers would be a formula for disaster…or a formula for hiding one.