This page needs to be reworked and completely...hopefully, in the meantime you still find some useful stuff here...
The disaster of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 [Wikipedia] has become a key event that revealed not only serious lacks in mastering complex technology and evaluating risks, but even more importantly organizational problems in managing complex projects, communication issues between decision makers, scientists and managers. Of course these problems were not new at the time, but the Challenger disaster drew much more public attention to these issues with long lasting effects on the awareness of these problems. The Challenger accident has become an important case study for management of large projects, risk assessment and communication issues.
Richard Feynman [Wikipedia] played an essential role in this, as a prominent member of the Presidential Investigation Committee [Rogers Commission Report]. He used his reputation to force the Commission to publish his own personal unconventional investigation of the accident. He concluded his report "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
The disaster has been widely documented and discussed elsewhere; the aim here is to raise awareness for dimensions that underpin all human and scientific activities in the modern world. Although the accident is clearly due to the failure at low temperatures of the material used to seal the segments of the two booster rockets, the reasons why the (known) risk was not taken into account is, as the Rogers report says rooted in history, i.e. standard practice that finally lead to disaster.
The aim here is to broaden the perspective by highlighting the dilemmas, general central aspects etc. faced by technology, science and the modern world at large. Although my point of view is one of a social scientist, in a traditional university setting, the issues discussed here are much broader and general and common to many fields of human activities. Even the most advanced technology has been conceived by humans, are controlled by humans working in institutions or organizations with their constraints and rooted in their history.
The 19th century is clearly the age of mechanical machines and has shaped our view of science and technology, i.e. for every problem there is or will be a (single) solution, given that engineers get sufficient time and resources. In this view an accident is just an accident and as technology will improve, there will be no or fewer similar problems in the future, no need to go further and if humankind is to advance to a even brighter future, we have to accept the technology is not perfect yet and some sacrifices are inevitable. This attitude and belief rooted our education is not always helpful to understand the modern world. Many have said that the 20th century is the century of complexity, i.e. most everything is complex by essence: no matter how much we try it is impossible to reduce it to our lack of understanding and technology, but in a not so distant future we will finally solve all problem(s). In other words complexity is inherent in nature and the more we learn the more complexity arises. Coming back to complex technology projects like the Challenger space shuttle: No matter what will be done in the future there will be more accidents, hopefully even less frequent. For this reason it is essential not only to accept that fact, but to make sure than whenever an accident occurs we need to be able to learn from it. Today there are ISO norms that require that all details of planning, construction of big technology projects are documented in great details. etc. It seems that the general acceptance of these principles are one of the consequences of the Challenger disaster.
In the Social Sciences of course research is not based on constructing space ships, airports and so on, but the social, psychological environment of a human beings is at least as complex and very likely even less well understood. [to be developed]
Challenger Disaster: Sending the space shuttle into orbit requires the collaboration of thousands of companies and specialist, each of them taking care of a small piece of the rockets (two booster rockets and the main rocket) and the shuttle. Many of these pieces are critical and could cause a problem or even a des aster. It is therefor essential to assess the risks, i.e. thousands of potential risks linked to a particular piece. Finally the managers and directors of the whole project have to decide to launch. The problem is that no one has a complete view of a all potential problems, and decision makers are usually not trained for this. As complex technology projects require collaboration, communication between the engineers and the decisions makers, as well as among the specialists becomes crucial. In addition in 1986 NASA was under pressure to launch successfully. It is again the merit of R. Feynman to make sure that everyone understood, that the disaster was clearly rooted in the management and organizational setup of the project.
Complexity leads directly to differentiation and specialization. Well known historical figures (from Aristotle to Leonardo and Spinoza) are considered polymaths, covering most fields of scientific activity. Besides these exceptional minds, most of us specialize in a specific discipline with particular skills and knowledge. Today most scientific disciplines no longer exist as such, but as a multitude of sub and sub-sub disciplines charting with its own language, procedures, standards, (peer-reviewed) publications and a scientist outside this context will have trouble understanding and critically review research in another sub-discipline. If you are a social scientist working e.g. on Social Movements, you will very likely have poor skills with Family Studies, Political Theory etc, or more importantly to most of us what is happening outside our field is of much less, even no interest. Scientist are under pressure to publish to get or keep a job and you need to publish in specialist journals on highly specific topics using an accepted methodology. More general generalist views are no longer rewarded. 2
Edward Tufte has shown convincingly in chapter 2 of Visual Explanations, Display of Evidence for making decisions (published as a separate booklet as well), that the decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger was, at least partly, due to poor communication of important data, namely the relationship between o-ring damage (seals between the segments of the booster rockets) and temperature was not clearly shown; although the risk was known but not correctly identified by the decision makers, the decision to launch was taken.
By the way Tufte also presents arguments, that other major shuttle accident (Columbia, 2003) was also based on poor communication, i.e. Powerpoint slides. (See Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching out Corrupts Within)