Feynman Dies: Physics Loses Its Most Brilliant Storyteller

Richard Feynman diagnosed the Challenger disaster with a glass of ice water and a piece of rubber. During a televised hearing of the Rogers Commission in 1986, he dipped a section of O-ring material into a cup of ice water and showed that it lost its resilience at low temperatures. The rubber stiffened. The audience could see it. That was the explanation for why the Space Shuttle Challenger had broken apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members. Born in Far Rockaway, Queens on May 11, 1918, Feynman showed an early aptitude for mathematics that his father, a uniform salesman, actively encouraged. He earned his doctorate at Princeton under John Archibald Wheeler and joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos at 24. He was the youngest group leader on the project. While at Los Alamos, his first wife, Arline, was dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Albuquerque. He drove to see her on weekends. She died in June 1945, weeks before the Trinity test. His contribution to physics was the development of quantum electrodynamics (QED), a theory describing how light and matter interact at the subatomic level. His approach used what became known as Feynman diagrams, intuitive visual representations of particle interactions that simplified calculations physicists had previously found nearly impossible. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who had independently developed equivalent formulations. He was a legendarily effective teacher. His undergraduate lectures at Caltech, published as The Feynman Lectures on Physics, remain in use decades after they were delivered. He played bongo drums, picked locks for entertainment, painted under a pseudonym, and spent time in strip clubs in Pasadena working on physics problems. The Challenger investigation was his final public act. He conducted his own inquiry parallel to the official commission, talking directly to engineers who had warned NASA about the O-ring problem. His appendix to the commission's report concluded: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." He died of kidney cancer on February 15, 1988, at 69.