"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."
Today's Question
When you feel you 'know something for sure,' is that certainty supported by facts you've checked, or by a feeling of familiarity?
One glass of ice water exposed the cause of a space shuttle disaster
Richard Feynman won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for quantum electrodynamics, and was also a prankster who cracked safes and played the bongos. He believed only experiment and evidence—never authority or reputation—could settle the truth.
At a public hearing of the commission investigating the 1986 Challenger explosion, he dipped a piece of the rubber O-ring material into a glass of ice water and showed that it lost its resilience. In his report he wrote, 'Nature cannot be fooled.'