Originally Posted by mercurydancer
drummer and safecracker; All in all the man was an inspiration for me.
And to me and hopefully many others. His two books are really worth reading. His almost-earthy talking manner belies the brilliance of ideas streaming forth and the constant mirth underneath the serious stuff.
His use of a small clamp and a short piece of O-ring he 'found' at Morton-Thiokol is the stuff of legends, focussing in one tiny glass of ice-water the millions of words and thousands of pages of engineering work, policy-and-procedures manuals, emails and testimony and pointing directly at the cause of the accident. It was for others, especially people like sociologist Diane Vaughan, to put into words why in an organization dedicated to flight safety that, through the normalization of deviance, nobody "saw" and therefore never considered what untested cold temperatures would do to a mission-critical rubber seal. "
I'll see it when I believe it" implies a cognitive connection between belief and apprehension by the senses. Part of Feynman's genius was in making such connections visible to those who didn't believe in the first place and
that is inspiring.