When legendary physicist Richard Feynman was called in to help solve the mystery of the Challenger space shuttle explosion in 1986, he didn’t use advanced maths. Instead, according to his own account of the incident, he went and talked to the engineers.

The workers who actually built the space shuttle, he found, had a good idea of which parts were likely to fail. Talking to them helped point Feynman toward a flaw in the rubber O-ring joints, which everyone eventually realised was what brought the shuttle down...

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