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Feynman was famed for his uncanny ability to cut to the heart of a problem with novel approaches. Feynman liked to tell a story about how when he was a little kid, he asked his father, "Why do things fall?" As an adult, he praised his father for answering, "Nobody knows why things fall. It's a deep mystery, and the smartest people in the world don't know the basic reason for it." Contrast that with the average person's off-the-cuff answer, "Oh, it's because of gravity." Feynman liked his father's answer, because his father realized that simply giving a name to something didn't mean that you understood it. <ref>Lectures in Physics:  The Motion of Falling Objects.  Lectures on Physics is based on the series by Benjamin Crowell, "Light and Matter". (This is a secondary source.) [http://www.vias.org/physics/bk1_05_01.html]</ref>

Feynman was famed for his uncanny ability to cut to the heart of a problem with novel approaches. Feynman liked to tell a story about how when he was a little kid, he asked his father, "Why do things fall?" As an adult, he praised his father for answering, "Nobody knows why things fall. It's a deep mystery, and the smartest people in the world don't know the basic reason for it." Contrast that with the average person's off-the-cuff answer, "Oh, it's because of gravity." Feynman liked his father's answer, because his father realized that simply giving a name to something didn't mean that you understood it. <ref>Lectures in Physics:  The Motion of Falling Objects.  Lectures on Physics is based on the series by Benjamin Crowell, "Light and Matter". (This is a secondary source.) [http://www.vias.org/physics/bk1_05_01.html]</ref>

This approach to problem solving was utterly at odds with the culture at NASA during the 1980s. NASA had decided that the space shuttle ought to be so reliable that each mission had only a 1 in 100,000 chance of failure. They fudged safety figures for parts such as the infamous O-rings whose failure at unusually low launch temperatures destroyed [[Space Shuttle Challenger]].

This approach to problem solving was utterly at odds with the culture at NASA during the 1980s.<ref>"... his independent intellect and direct methods were at odds with the commission’s formal approach." [http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/richard-feynman-challenger-disaster-software-engineering Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering] </ref>

NASA had decided that the space shuttle ought to be so reliable that each mission had only a 1 in 100,000 chance of failure. They fudged safety figures for parts such as the infamous O-rings whose failure at unusually low launch temperatures destroyed [[Space Shuttle Challenger]].

==Challenger investigation==

==Challenger investigation==