Biography

Sat on the Challenger US space shuttle disaster commission. He was the one who reported the o-ring as being the cause of the explosion.

According to "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" written by Feynman himself, he started drumming during his time at Los Alamos as he was enchanted by the drumming of the Indians and because there was no entertainment there. He tried to give it up after he became a Professor (which coincided with his 10 month stay in Brazil) Later on he began to play again and taught himself African drumming after a friend gave him some sheet music based on the drumming of the Watusi tribe.

His younger sister Joan was born 30 March 1927 in Queens and died 22 July 2020 in Oxnard, Caliornia. She was a renowned astrophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Lab and married to another astrophysicist Alexander Ruzmaikin.

Won Nobel Prize in physics (1965). He was considering turning it down.

Signed all of his sketches and drawings under the pen name "Ofey" so no one would figure out it was him who was drawing them.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. [After working on the Challenger investigation]

I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring. [last words]

For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units which they use for measuring energy.

The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth. I usually pick one small topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part - perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the "why?" It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize. "Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. [on identifying the reason for the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger by showing that O-rings grow brittle when immersed in water, Life magazine, January 1987]