Misadventures in Journalism

Almost ten years later, I finally learn the story behind the story behind the story.

Sep 21, 2024

I previously wrote about the “Feynman Fallacy” — physicists deluded that they can solve any problem better than anyone else. I used the Challenger disaster investigation as a helpful way to think about the Feynman Fallacy, and the problem of expert judgement in general. It turned out that there was a story behind the popular story of Feynman’s role in that investigation. Now I’m going to tell a story behind that story. If that is too meta for you, think of it this way: this article serves as the reference section to the previous one.

Space shuttle launches were triumphant television spectacles. I was 12 years old at the time of the Challenger launch, and if I had lived in a more convenient time zone my class would likely have been gathered around a television to watch it. It is estimated that 2.5 million school children did watch live as seven people launched from Cape Canaveral, in part because the crew included Christa McAuliffe, who had applied along with 11,000 others to become the first teacher sent into space. They watched in awe for over a minute, as the shuttle blasted off and rose to 14km over the Atlantic Ocean1. Then it exploded.

In 2013 the BBC produced a TV film called “The Challenger”, a dramatisation of the investigation into the cause of the disaster. The main character was physicist Richard Feynman. He was an ideal protagonist, an outspoken outsider struggling to unravel a mystery while also fighting his own battle with cancer, and the person who dramatically demonstrated the ultimate cause of the disaster on live television — O-ring seals that did not function properly in the cold weather on the morning of the launch. It also can’t have hurt the pitch that Feynman himself had already told the story in a 1988 collection, “What do you care what other people think?”, which was a bestseller.

Feynman’s stories have worked their way into the DNA of many physicists and I am certainly one of them. Many years after reading them as an undergraduate, and now a physics professor myself, it was a joy to watch the BBC dramatisation of his last big adventure on the Challenger commission. William Hurt2 played the lead, and it was moving to see Feynman come to life. There was an earlier Feynman film, Infinity, with John Cusack telling the love story of Feynman and his first wife, who died of tuberculosis in 1945, but it was pretty cheesy. John Cusack was just John Cusack. William Hurt was absolutely Feynman. I loved watching a story I had known for 20 years play out on the screen.

So I was surprised to discover that I did not know the story so well. There was a twist. They kept it until the very end.

The investigation team included the famous astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. Feynman didn’t interact much with them. The guy he got to know well was General Kutyna. One evening Kutyna had dinner with Feynman, and after dinner suggested to him that cold might affect the O-rings and allow them to leak, and Feynman ran with it. Kutyna had effectively passed on concerns that had come from technical experts, but having Feynman push the matter would keep the source of the information hidden. They wanted to hide a leak that explained a leak.

As I wrote in the last piece, this version of the story gave Feynman a less prominent role in solving the problem than he might have implied in his own telling, but none of that was new. James Gleick’s Feynman biography, for example, goes into some detail about the investigation, and describes how a source among “the engineers and astronauts” told Kutyna that the manufacturers were concerned about the resiliency of the O-rings when cold.

Then came something entirely new.

After the last scene faded out, we were given the standard set of “what happened next” screens of text. The third of them read, “Sally Ride died in 2012. Following her death, General Kutyna revealed that she was the secret source of his information about the O-rings.”

What? Where did that come from? I hadn’t heard about that before!

Maybe it was a minor detail, but it was a minor detail that was missing from every account I had read. Ok, fine: no-one knew this until after 2012. But presumably it was now part of the official story?

I googled, but found nothing about it. There was no mention of Sally Ride’s role anywhere, except in the closing captions of a TV drama. I trusted the BBC that it was true, but if it was true, where did it come from? Was it documented anywhere more substantial than six seconds of film?

Now I became a victim of the Feynman Fallacy myself. I got excited, and thought, “I could find out! I could do some investigative journalism!”

At first “investigative journalism” remained merely a synonym for google. I found some articles about the BBC film, and some names of people who worked on it. However, none of these leads provided any useful information. Nowhere was the Sally Ride revelation ever discussed.

I decided I needed to talk to one of these BBC people. But how? I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could just phone the BBC and be put through to their research team. I had a name — a lead! — but no way to contact him.

Then I had a brilliant idea, worthy indeed of a clever physicist with a latent genius for journalism. I could guess the email address! It was probably just “firstname.lastname@bbc.co.uk”. I wrote an email saying how much I enjoyed the Challenger film (see how sneaky that was? starting out with complements? what a pro!) and then asked if there was a reference to the Sally Ride story.

It worked! The researcher wrote back to me, and we planned to talk on the phone.

Then things went wrong.

In my email I said I was writing a piece about this story. That was true — I was very excited to show off my investigative journalism prowess on my blog! Of course, the researcher’s first question was where my story would be published, and when I revealed that it was for a mere blog post, his enthusiasm plummeted.

The whole thing spiralled further downhill when he explained that the conversation would have to be off the record, and then delivered a rather testy lecture on what exactly that meant.

I can’t remember the lecture because, in addition to being such a poor journalist that I did not know how to navigate the technicalities of off-record and on-record conversations, I also didn’t think to take notes. At the time I was freaked out that I couldn’t publish anything that he told me, but now, almost ten years later, I can’t even remember what he told me!

Whatever it was, it’s clear that they had learned the story directly from Kutyna, almost certainly in interviews for the film. Given the researcher’s reaction it is also pretty clear that at the time this was not documented anywhere else.

At that point, I didn’t really care. I was bummed at having botched such a simple fact checking exercise. I was especially bummed that I could not write up an amusing story about my foray into journalism. Maybe I could spin it as an account of my failure? But I had no idea exactly how much I was allowed to say, and, besides, I was sick of the whole thing and just wanted to go and sit alone in a dark room for a while3.

A few months later I wrote the piece I recently re-published, which framed the whole story around the Feynman Fallacy, and described Sally Ride’s role with no reference or citation whatsoever, not even to the BBC drama. To hell with them!

Now that I come back to relate this little mis-adventure, I see that in the intervening years someone has properly got Kutyna on the record. A 2016 story in Popular Mechanics, which quotes from many personal accounts of the story of the Challenger disaster, includes this from Kutyna:

One day [early in the investigation] Sally Ride and I were walking together. She was on my right side and was looking straight ahead. She opened up her notebook and with her left hand, still looking straight ahead, gave me a piece of paper. Didn't say a single word. I look at the piece of paper. It's a NASA document. It's got two columns on it. The first column is temperature, the second column is resiliency of O-rings as a function of temperature. It shows that they get stiff when it gets cold. Sally and I were really good buddies. She figured she could trust me to give me that piece of paper and not implicate her or the people at NASA who gave it to her, because they could all get fired.

That sounds like a great scene in a film. I can’t understand why they didn’t use it. Maybe Kutyna was uncomfortable the first time he told the story? Maybe he didn’t want his new information to feature so prominently? Or maybe the film-makers wanted to keep the focus on Feynman, at least until the story was done?

Someone could ask them. But it’s not going to be me.

The Fictional Aether

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