Roger boisjoly richard feynman biography

  • Personal account of Roger Boisjoly, a Morton Thiokol engineer who interacted with Feynman during the time of the Rogers Commission on the space shuttle.
  • Richard Feynman, then still at Princeton, had secured some notoriety among his peers as to his exceptional talents in math and physics, and the physicist Robert.
  • By peculiar coincidence, Roger Mark Boisjoly, who died last month, aged 73, lived as long in years as Challenger did in seconds.

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    by Mark Martin

    1. Prologue:

    Twentieth century physics is very often defined bygd a pair of sweeping, powerful icons of nature, namely, the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics, which were brought into the world at about the years and , respectively. But tucked between these two dates is the year , and in the spring of that year there came into the world another sweeping icon capable of single handedly defining twentieth century physics, and that icon was, and is, Richard Feynman. He was born into what was, in retrospect, perhaps an intellectual stew simmering to perfection.

    2. How to Start a Feynman:

    Feynman&#;s childhood home was in the community of Far Rockaway, just on the southern skirt of Manhattan. Financially his family was neither rich nor poor. They were materially comfortable, but not wealthy. As a ung man he had the opportunity to learn to work industriously, but without undo pressure to perform. That in itself would be a theme that he&#;d rediscover

  • roger boisjoly richard feynman biography

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    A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

    The history inom learned about the Challenger accident investigation was wrong.

    I stumbled across the real story while researching famous accidents, for an article I published on the MongoDB Engineering Blog about a mistake I made: “When Switching Projects, Check your Assumptions or fara Disaster”. In the article, inom wanted to compare my mistake to the NASA engineers' mistake, and of course I referred to Richard Feynman’s televised demonstration that the Challenger had exploded because its O-rings got stiff when they were cold.

    But it wasn’t Feynman’s discovery. It was Sally Ride’s.

    Ride, a physicist and astronaut, was on that investigative commission too, and it was she who uncovered the suppressed data about the O-rings. As her fellow commission member, General Donald Kutyna, revealed to Popular Mechanics:

    One day Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened

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    by Roger M. Boisjoly

    I met Richard Feynman during very tough personal circumstances while on the receiving end of questions during the investigation of the Challenger disaster. I was the principal engineer on the SRM joints and one of the Morton Thiokol (MTI) engineers who made the futile attempt to stop the launch. I felt it was my professional responsibility to expose the truth to the Presidential Commission on which Dr. Feynman was, in my opinion, the most personally and professionally objective member and I might add the ONLY fearless member concerning potential career damage.

    As a result, he was told not to talk to engineers like me but that did not deter him from finding out the truth. After my closed door and public testimony to the Commission at which he always addressed me as Dr.  Boisjoly, I received many personal calls from Dr. Feynman as he was seeking answers to questions. He started every phone call by addressing me as Dr. Boisjoly and I would tell him immediately