Necroing this thread, since recently I was looking up famous quotes in Japanese.
My favorite quote in English, strangely enough, is Richard Feynman:
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
In Japanese I found it translated as:
「ある技術を成功させようと思えば、PRよりも現実を優先させよ。おおいなる自然はだまされたりしないから。」
He was on the team to investigate the Challenger explosion, and this quote comes from the conclusion of an appendix he wrote for the report:
"If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering
often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of
originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a
very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with
apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights
may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively
unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent
(it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the
probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this
may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and
success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that
they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost
incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working
engineers.
In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most
serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a
dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary
airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks,
and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that McAuliffe was
equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of
the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?
Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a
world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and
imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate
them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of
the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be
realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty
of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed,
schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way
the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to
the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and
informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for
the use of their limited resources.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over
public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Last edited by Tzadeck (2012 December 20, 9:02 pm)
