“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Richard Feynman
Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle (Primary source)
A devastatingly frank appendix to the presidential report on the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, wherein Richard Feynman exposed the chasm between NASA management’s optimistic reliability estimates and engineering reality, offering an unvarnished dissection of institutional failure that became a landmark in government accountability.
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“Knowledge is of no real value if all you can tell me is what happened yesterday. It is necessary to tell what will happen tomorrow.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“I think that to keep trying new solutions is the way to do everything.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work.”
— Richard Feynman Primary sourceMore quotes by Richard Feynman →
“The imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.”
— Andrew S. Grove Primary source“It is important to make a dream of life and a dream reality.”
— Marie Curie Disputed“The law of nature is, do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary sourceTechnology Reality Public Relations Nature