Technocracy in America

Last night I completed my physics curriculum for the summer, reading the last of four books in my care on great physicists of the 20th century.

One was mainly a survey of modern German history, Fritz Stern's Einstein's German World. I found it an interesting though disjointed collection of biographical essays on Einstein and other prominent German physicists of his day. The title misleads the reader as well, as really only a little more than half of the book's longest chapter discusses Einstein; the remainder includes only tangential mention of Dr. Albert or doesn't bring him up at all.

The other three I read were by Nobel laureate Richard P. Feynman. One I mentioned earlier, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of his short works I found a bit technical for my tastes. Not to worry. My dad proved correct in his assertion that Feynman was an interesting cat, as evidenced by "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character, which lived up to its billing. But really fascinating and instructive was the book I just finished late last night, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" Further Adventures of a Curious Character.

Most fascinating in this was the lengthy section in which Feynman recounts his work on the Rogers Commission, appointed by ex-Communicator-in-Chief Ronnie Reagan to investigate the causes of the Space Shuttle Challenger catastrophe. I'm a wee bit too young to remember this time myself, but Feynman became a popular hero for playing the role of Mad Scientist/Bureaucracy Buster. He's the one who first made public the problem of cold temperatures on the rubber o-rings used to seal the shuttle's booster rockets.

At one of the commission's meetings, a typically dull, banal affair full of bureaucratese and so utterly bogged down by technical discussions and the jargon of officialdom, Feynman made his point dramatically and theatrically. To illustrate the fragility of the o-rings at cold temperatures, he stuck one in a glass of ice water to demonstrate that it no longer maintained the flexibility essential to keeping a seal and preventing disaster. Pretty impressive stuff that gave pause to a lot of people. I found it really illuminating, however, that Feynman focused on a more fundamental cause of the Challenger accident, one that went beyond the physical limitations of o-rings.

As I read this section, I thought to myself that were I to ever teach a political science class on the institutional workings of government, this book would be required reading on my syllabi. (It's the aspiring professor in me. Fortunately, I plan to avoid political science like the MS Blaster worm, so I won't put myself through such a torturous exercise as teaching a college course on the intricacies of bureaucracy.) The performance of the o-ring at low temps mattered, Feynman argues, because of the management culture at NASA. Engineers would raise concerns about some potential design flaw or other problem, say the failure of o-rings in freezing conditions, but management and other higher-ups would not only disregard such warnings but pervert them and claim it demonstrated a greater level of safety than actually existed. Facts were overlooked, ignored or manipulated to stick to an ambitious launch schedule. Unsurprisingly, this meant safety suffered, and six astronauts plus a teacher perished in an accident that could've been prevented. All to make sure that we kept having frequent launches. Sound eerily familiar? Hasn't the term "broken safety culture" been used recently to describe NASA in the wake of the investigation into the Columbia explosion?

If only governments and bureaucracies, societies and peoples could learn a lesson or two from the past. Then I wouldn't have the ethical imperative to become a history professor and instead could take up a frivolous avocation. Like rocket scientist.